Ever so slight video hiccups driving me crazy

[dinki]

Dang.

Have you tried leaving task manager minimized while you watch TV? Then when you see the glitch, quickly look at TM to see if there was a spike in CPU usage. If so, you could use sysinternals' File Monitor to possible track down what is causing the jump in CPU usage.

Are you timeshifting TV when you notice this? Could be HDD performance or IRQ issues causing the glitch. Have you defrag'd your recordings partition lately?

I haven't seen any spikes so I'm pretty sure that's not it.

I do have PerfectDisc scheduled to run everyday. My drive has about 20 gigs free out of the 120 gig capacity. I'll try clearing out some junk and do another defrag and see if that helps.

[j3flight]

In my opinion, using Task Manager is a poor way to diagnose stuff like this. Task Manager runs at HIGH priority and when it's refreshing the list it can eat into your video playback and cause frame drops of its own. You're better off using the Performance Monitors within Administrative Tools.

[pBS]

i'm having some success with setting in config.xml:
<VMRWindowedMode>false</VMRWindowedMode>
looks good even on sports so far..
but still doesn't allow me to watch HD tho...[overlay works!]
but very watchable for sd tv..

it also got rid of the audio sync problem too..
[and yes i'm using dscaler..its the best free one out there i think]

overlay looks really nice if you add a little bit of ffdshow post processing..

[dinki]

Thanks again for all the help. I tried dscaler last night as well as the VMRWindowedMode above. Not much difference while watching timeshifted tv.

I did find, however, that live tv in preview mode does not appear to exhibit the behavior I am seeing in the timeshifted mode. I still haven't tried recording a news channel to see if I see the same thing on playback though.