Stutter on TVout w/MVP enabled resolved

[scim]

I have tried everything and am still having problems with bad stuttering on the TV connected to the PC when someone else is watching on the MVP. I have tried setting the priority of PVXR2 to above normal as suggested but this makes little or no difference.
I have watched the CPU usage on the PC when the MVP is being used and this shows about 5 percent cpu when an mpeg is playing (this doesn't cause any stuttering) which goes up to an intermittant 25 percent when paused (although interestingly this is lower when watching paused live TV). When clicking through menus cpu spikes up to 100 percent causing severe stuttering and pauses.
My PC is not the fastest but is reasonable, it is an Athlon 2800+ with 1Gb of memory. Does anyone have any suggestions?

[pastro]

I have tried everything and am still having problems with bad stuttering on the TV connected to the PC when someone else is watching on the MVP. I have tried setting the priority of PVXR2 to above normal as suggested but this makes little or no difference.
I have watched the CPU usage on the PC when the MVP is being used and this shows about 5 percent cpu when an mpeg is playing (this doesn't cause any stuttering) which goes up to an intermittant 25 percent when paused (although interestingly this is lower when watching paused live TV). When clicking through menus cpu spikes up to 100 percent causing severe stuttering and pauses.
My PC is not the fastest but is reasonable, it is an Athlon 2800+ with 1Gb of memory. Does anyone have any suggestions?

I raised the priority of PVRX2 to above normal and the MVPs have normal priority. This fixed my one every minute stutter when the time was updated. I'll check tonight and see if it stuttters when the kids are messing with the menus.

[mvallevand]

From my HVR 1600 watching QAM livetv on the PC with PVRX2 and SD analog livetv on the mvp, I see no impact on the PC, other then the decreased network traffic while the mvp is paused except a hick when pause is released on the PC. Here is how it shows in the Vista performance graphs.

All of this is running normal priority.

Martin

[pastro]

From my HVR 1600 watching QAM livetv on the PC with PVRX2 and SD analog livetv on the mvp, I see no impact on the PC, other then the decreased network traffic while the mvp is paused except a hick when pause is released on the PC. Here is how it shows in the Vista performance graphs.

All of this is running normal priority.

Martin

Do you see any large spikes when you click on the menus on the MVP?

I would have liked to run mine at all normal, but the time update causes my main screen to stutter unless I run above normal.

[mvallevand]

Do you see any large spikes when you click on the menus on the MVP?

No spikes and no disturbance of livetv PVRX2 on the PC when I hit the tv/guide/music/videos buttons on the mvp, which I think is what you are talking about.

Pretty much the most impact I could generate was running ff on the mvp in the non-short skip mode and cpu use hit 30% but live tv on PVRX2 didn't suffer.

Martin

[scim]

That's interesting but a bit confusing, at least it gives me hope that there may be a solution. I will do some screen shots of the graphs from my PC (XP) tonightwhen I get home. Interestingly whilst I have always had this problem I haven't got any regular spike that match up to the clock refresh when on the home screen which I know has been an issue for many.

[scim]

I have just managed to capture some graphs to show what I mean.

The following 3 graphs are, in order, while clicking through menus on the MVP, while playing a recording (mpeg) and lastly while pausing a recording. The only other thing running on the PC was a VNC session.

[sub]

Generating data to send to the MVP is very CPU intensive, so I'm not surprised you'd see CPU peaks. How big they are, how long they last, and how much impact they have on other things running on your machine (including PVRX2) probably depends on how fast your server is. Modern dual core processors will cope better than single core or slower CPU setups.

[scim]

What I find difficult to understand is why substantially (many times) more cpu is used when the playback is paused, this seems counter-intuitive.

[sub]

Sending video to the MVP uses very minimal resources. It is effectively just passing chunks of raw file data to the MVP, and the MVP is decoding it all in hardware.

Sending screens to the MVP is very CPU intensive, with the all the items on the screen needing to be rendered, composited into a single picture, having its colour space converted from RGB to YUV, then the image is zipped and transmitted across the network for display on the MVP. All of these steps are required for each screen sent to the MVP.

The default settings are to force minimal OSD, which from memory doesnt show any OSD graphics when the video is paused. If you disabled this 'minimal OSD' or are seeing any graphics, then a lot of work is going on behind the scenes to send screens to the MVP.