Stuttering HD

[patmoore]

Hauppage 4000 running DVB-T and DVB-S, ATI 3450 graphics, Intel Core2 E8400 3GHz and Vista. Display is primary HDMI at 1080i (so should have H.264 h/w assist)

All fine for SD, and CPU at a few %. However Freesat HD channels stutter about once per sec. CPU shows both cores at around 40%. All other resource usage is low.

Logs (attached) show the PowerDVD H.264 codec in use. I assume this is where all the CPU is going. The only options Config shows for H.264 codec are system default and PowerDVD. Should there be a separate codec for the ATI 3450 h/w assist?

I'm currently using overlay mode, but changing it doesn't help.

I'v updated to the latest ATI drivers.

Any clues what's causing the stutter?

[Dave_M]

You don't get hardware assist automatically. Only if the codec can make use of the graphics card. Your CPU is easily powerful enough for software decoding, so I would try FFDshow codecs. http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles..._id=199421

[sub]

On Vista you should be using the EVR renderer if you want to be able to do any hardware acceleration. You're currently using Overlay.

[patmoore]

Wow! Switching to EVR dropped the CPU down to a few %. Looks like the h/w has kicked in with the PDVD codec.

I thought I'd tried this before, but maybe not. Stutter also seems to have gone, although I'm waiting for the few HD channels to show some sport, which was where the stutter was most painful.

Thanks for the quick reply.

[pgoelz]

FWIW, I had a similar problem.... stuttery playback on a new laptop with Vista (x64). I too thought I tried all rendering options with no improvement. But when I (again, I think) set it to EVR, it now plays perfectly. Go figure.

Paul