Questions on Playback and Quality

[Landru]

I have two questions, but first the setup:

1.8 GHz Celeron
256 MB
WinTV PVR150
MediaMPV
Analog cable


1) Playback through GP-PVR to the computer monitor and the MediaMPV are both stuttering. Live TV and net Radio are fine. Any thought on correcting this?

2) My recordings seem to be a bit fuzzy (some horizontal broken lines). Recordings from the Hauppauge software (WinTV2000 look ok). Any thoughts here?

Thanks!

[AOSandman]

I'm running a similar system & have a few recommendations. Start by analyzing your system performance when the stuttering occurs. You will probably see high CPU utilization and a lot of disk thrashing. Adding more RAM will help, 256 is pretty low. I would also recommend recording to a different physical HD than the system drive. Put the drives on separate channels, get another controller card if needed to accomplish this. Make sure your swap file is sized properly. For the MVP, keep an eye on the network utilization on the PC. Use good network cables, use a switch instead of a hub, make sure you're getting a 100 mbit connection and not a 10.

[Landru]

Thanks!

Hmm, this morning the stutter is gone. And I think a higher quality cable signal splitter is indicated to replace the cheapy the cable company left behind.

I'm already on a switch, using good cat-5 cables. CompUSA has a special on memory tomorrow, I think I'll add 512 MB, since I'm showing commit charges of over 300 MB and the system is seeming to thrash a bit.

I already have two physical drives, Ultra Wide SCSI, 17GB system drive and 73 GB for GB-PVR. Unfortunately, adding another controller is not an option right now, since an Ultra320 card (which is where I really want to go) is cost prohibitive right now.

Any other thoughts to improve performance?

Landru

[AOSandman]

I was assuming IDE, since you've got SCSI drives I highly doubt disk i/o is an issue. You'll probably see a big improvement just from the additional RAM. Don't forget to adjust your swap file size after adding the RAM, and then defrag the drive.

[Darx-starz]

And....... Defrag your drive every day. You can setup a schedule for this. You are creating and possibly deleting the same large files every day. I use a single drive and I do at times get a problem. Usualy on the hour... Strange