ZProcess: Hunter not starting up.

[goobie]

Hello,

I got my MVP three weeks ago and are in the process of setting it up, but I'm having this annoying problem which I think is due to ZProcess. I searched the forum but was unable to get any help. I was therefore hoping that some clever person here could have a look at the logs and perhaps indicate a troubleshooting direction to follow. If you find that the problem is with GBPVR then please indicate so and I will post there.

In short; movie AVI's only play for ~12-16 seconds then stop. From the logs I can see that transcoding stopped after 7 seconds. The strangest thing is that if I fiddle around with all the setting (GBPVR and ZProcess) I SOMETIMES manages (about 1 out of 10 times) to get it going and play the full movie, so I know there is nothing wrong with the file. However, it is difficult to see a pattern in what I must fiddle with to make it work. Most of the time it is however impossible and frustrating to watch a movie.

When I manages to get the movie going all is fine, the HUNTER app as well as the DOS transcoding window starts up and work as they should. The rest of the time when I only get 12 seconds of movie neither of them starts up at all, so I'm not sure whether Hunter is the problem or not.

I'm using GBPVR (99.12) with ZProcess (latest version) to get the aspect ratios right for my 4:3 TV, no plugins, standard dongle. The server is an AMD 3000 (2.2 Ghz, 1Gb RAM) WITHOUT a tuner. Network consist of a DLINK router and 3 switches before reaching the MVP (1000 rev H3). I'm running Windows XP (SP2) with no firewall. K-lite codecs installed.

Thank you in advance.

[zehd]

Hello,

I got my MVP three weeks ago and are in the process of setting it up, but I'm having this annoying problem which I think is due to ZProcess. I searched the forum but was unable to get any help. I was therefore hoping that some clever person here could have a look at the logs and perhaps indicate a troubleshooting direction to follow. If you find that the problem is with GBPVR then please indicate so and I will post there.

In short; movie AVI's only play for ~12-16 seconds then stop. From the logs I can see that transcoding stopped after 7 seconds. The strangest thing is that if I fiddle around with all the setting (GBPVR and ZProcess) I SOMETIMES manages (about 1 out of 10 times) to get it going and play the full movie, so I know there is nothing wrong with the file. However, it is difficult to see a pattern in what I must fiddle with to make it work. Most of the time it is however impossible and frustrating to watch a movie.

When I manages to get the movie going all is fine, the HUNTER app as well as the DOS transcoding window starts up and work as they should. The rest of the time when I only get 12 seconds of movie neither of them starts up at all, so I'm not sure whether Hunter is the problem or not.

I'm using GBPVR (99.12) with ZProcess (latest version) to get the aspect ratios right for my 4:3 TV, no plugins, standard dongle. The server is an AMD 3000 (2.2 Ghz, 1Gb RAM) WITHOUT a tuner. Network consist of a DLINK router and 3 switches before reaching the MVP (1000 rev H3). I'm running Windows XP (SP2) with no firewall. K-lite codecs installed.

Thank you in advance.

I'll have a closer look in a couple of hours. I will say that Hunter is working just fine. What it looks like is that GB-PVR is killing ZProcess because it's running out of file... For the moment read this stuff...

http://gbpvr.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Utili...cess#toc33

[zehd]

You'll notice that there is no time between these two entries...

Code:

5/14/2007 5:33:41 PM : Process spawned. Waiting for process window to close.
5/14/2007 5:33:41 PM : Hunter says Transcoder has closed.  Hunter exits too.

The first is that start of the transcode. The second is after ZProcess was forcibly closed by GB-PVR whether being a user selected stop, (there wasn't enough time for that obviously) or GB-PVR was so dissatisfied it wasn't even going to wait the pre-play delay before crashing...

This is mine. I cancelled the transcode from the 'stop' button on the remote

Code:

15/05/2007 9:37:02 PM : Process spawned. Waiting for process window to close.
15/05/2007 9:37:52 PM : Hunter says ZProcess has closed.  Kill Transcoder window too

I just noticed that you are running it from a server share. I've never tested that. I'd be surprised if it worked... Gonna try now...

Edit, noticed that you tried locally too...

It may be something with the pal-vcd defaults. I have no way of knowing whether they should be good or not...

I'd like you to transcode the video manulally using the same Trans2MVP profile, (pal-vcd et al)

Then try playing the resulting MPG on the MVP. Does that play. Does that play well?

[zehd]

Regarding the network shares: interesting. I had no idea that the network data transfer would be fast enough for a transcode. Thought for sure it would bring ZProcess, FFmpeg or GB-PVR to their respective knees...

But It works great. Thanks for the spinoff idea. But onto your problem...

[sub]

I think what zehd says above is correct.

Unfortunately your setup is unable to transcode in faster than realtime, so the playback soon catches up to the transcoding, and it decides its reached the end of the file and stops playback. Usually this is because the user's CPU is not fast enough, since it requires quite a bit of grunt to decode the avi video then re-encode as MPEG2 in faster than realt time. In this case if the file is on a network share, then this is probably a factor in why the transcode is not occuring fast enough.

You could try further increasing the <MVPTranscodePrePlayDelay> setting in config.xml. Also check that your hard disk has been defragmented to ensure speedy disk access.

[goobie]

Thanks guys for your input.

I too was concerned that the network share (all my MP3 and AVIs are on a central slower server) could cause the problem, so I transferred a movie to my C:\TEMP folder for testing purposes, but playing it from the local drive didn't do anything for the playback.

SOME QUESTIONS:
1. Shouldn't 2.2Ghz be fast enough for transcoding?
2. And why would it sometimes work and sometimes not? I use to be able to get it working before if I "re-gregister filters" but then in my stupidity I thouht reinstalling GBPVR and ZProcess would fix it, BUT, alas....I completely broke it! Now my success rate of getting it working is very low.
3. @Zehd, How do I temporarily disable ZProcess to see if GBPVR by itself can play the fulllength AVI correctly?

Things I will try tonight at home:
1. Defrag drives.
2. Increase <MVPTranscodePrePlayDelay> in config.xml
3. manual transcode file to MPG using PAL-SVCD and play to MVP

Please feel free to add anything else I need to test.

Thanks

[sub]

1. Shouldn't 2.2Ghz be fast enough for transcoding?

This is marginal. It requires a lot of grunt to decode the avi video then encode the video to MPEG2 in faster than real time.

For example, on this page http://www.hauppauge.com/pages/products/data_wmvp.html Hauppauge give the comment that 2.2GHz is required for watching divx AVI files. GB-PVRs trancoder has very similar requirements, but its hard to put an exact number - it might be slightly more. Either way, your processor is border line.

ZProcess's additional functions which tell the transcoder to requests different frame sizes etc may be adding a slight bit of extra load to the encoding, pushing your CPU into the "too slow" category.

2. And why would it sometimes work and sometimes not? I use to be able to get it working before if I "re-gregister filters" but then in my stupidity I thouht reinstalling GBPVR and ZProcess would fix it, BUT, alas....I completely broke it! Now my success rate of getting it working is very low.

As I said, your processor is borderline, so depending on the avi bitrate or encoding, or other things happening on your machine or network etc, you might just manage to stay ahead of playback some times.

No directshow filters are used in this processing, so its highly unlikely that running ReRegisterFilters had any impact on this.

[zehd]

1. Shouldn't 2.2Ghz be fast enough for transcoding?

I would say that sub's and Hauppauge's recommendation for a CPU of 2.2 Ghz is a little high IMHO. Two of my three systems are less than that and work very well, with two tuners recording, comskiping, and ZProcess transcoding on the fly displaying on MVP.

I think the real reason a computer runs out of grunt, is that many of us have a lot of other things going on in the background, stealing cycles from the CPU.

2. And why would it sometimes work and sometimes not? I use to be able to get it working before if I "re-gregister filters" but then in my stupidity I thouht reinstalling GBPVR and ZProcess would fix it, BUT, alas....I completely broke it! Now my success rate of getting it working is very low.

I agree with sub. You were actually not fixing anything, and it was just luck of the draw, with a borderline setup. (remember setup includes all parameters, not just CPU)

3. @Zehd, How do I temporarily disable ZProcess to see if GBPVR by itself can play the fulllength AVI correctly?

On the Utilities tab, GB-PVR settings, click 'Remove refs'. Now when GB-PVR tries to transcode it will use FFmpeg directly, with the settings that are stored in the config.xml

I should point out that when ZProcess does fire up, it uses some CPU of course, as all programs do, to make some calculations, retrieve data from registry, etc. It adds very little time to the on-the-fly process, and hardly any overhead. It then calls FFmpeg. During the on-the-fly transcode, it really doesn't do anything except sit and wait for the show to end...

I do not expect you to have any different success with or without ZProcess. I would suspect you need to look at what is eating your CPU...

[goobie]

...I do not expect you to have any different success with or without ZProcess...

OK so when I got home tonight I did a little bit of experimenting:

A) I started by removing and entering ZProcess refs into the config.xml as you suggest. I repeated it 4 times.

1. GBPVR+ZProcess - movie played for 11 seconds
2. GBPVR-ZProcess - although fullscreen, movie played just fine (I stopped it after a while but I'm convinced it would have played through had I left it running)
3. GBPVR+ZProcess - movie played for 11 seconds
4. GBPVR-ZProcess - again, movie played just fine.

so I'm still leaning towards ZProcess being the culprit. Playback was nice and smooth so I think my 2.2Ghz is enough processing power.

B) I also transcoded the AVI as PAL-DVD (compared to PAL-SVCD) on the fly but it made no difference...still 11 seconds of playback.

C) I manually transcoded the AVI (actually a 5 minute test run) to MPG with the PAL-SVCD profile and GBPVR+ZProcess played it perfectly.

any ideas, perhaps a different version of ZProcess? If so, where can I get it?

[zehd]

OK so when I got home tonight I did a little bit of experimenting:

A) I started by removing and entering ZProcess refs into the config.xml as you suggest. I repeated it 4 times.

1. GBPVR+ZProcess - movie played for 11 seconds
2. GBPVR-ZProcess - although fullscreen, movie played just fine (I stopped it after a while but I'm convinced it would have played through had I left it running)
3. GBPVR+ZProcess - movie played for 11 seconds
4. GBPVR-ZProcess - again, movie played just fine.

so I'm still leaning towards ZProcess being the culprit. Playback was nice and smooth so I think my 2.2Ghz is enough processing power.

B) I also transcoded the AVI as PAL-DVD (compared to PAL-SVCD) on the fly but it made no difference...still 11 seconds of playback.

C) I manually transcoded the AVI (actually a 5 minute test run) to MPG with the PAL-SVCD profile and GBPVR+ZProcess played it perfectly.

any ideas, perhaps a different version of ZProcess? If so, where can I get it?

Great troubleshooting. K... If you are using the default transcode line out of config.xml it should look like something like this

Code:

<MVPFFmpegTranscodeCmdLinePAL>-y -i "{SOURCE_FILE}" -b 2400k -ac 2 -ab 128 -r 25 -s 352x288 -f svcd "{DEST_FILE}"</MVPFFmpegTranscodeCmdLinePAL>

That means that your ZProcess Trans2MVP profile should look like this:

[ATTACHMENT NOT FOUND]

If you have all the settings like this, ZProcess will emulate Exactly the same settings as in GB-PVR's default config.xml

** BTW, to get the blank values, just highlight the text and delete.

When you have your ZProcess looking just like this, press the save button and try again..

Since I do not have PAL, I can not be sure that the standard settings for PAL-VCD or SVCD or DVD are correct. Perhaps I have assumed wrongly, but I have had many PAL users use the default settings and it's been fine.

Anyway, with these settings, you can then start to try better settings... Like 640x576...


EDIT: ooops. Just discovered that ZProcess won't save the Target blank. Hang tight... I'll roll out a fix...

Edit2: Try the attached version of ZProcess... (1007)