Problem Pausing/Playing HD Digital Recordings

[lyntonb]

I am experiencing difficulties with pausing, resuming, fastforwarding and skipping HD digital recordings (and live TV). I have no problems at all with SD recordings.
In HD TS files the first pause early in a recording responds to resume OK, but after that I have to wait from 20 seconds to over 3 minutes for the video to resume and a similar length of time following that for the audio to restart.
I have tried every combination of audio and video codecs on my system. I have also experimented with various other config settings to no avail.
Is there any know combination of codecs and settings that overcome this problem? Or is this a hardware or display driver issue?
logs are attached.

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AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600+
4 GB RAM
Windows XP Home SP3 (32 Bit)
PVR Software: GBPVR v1.4.7
Hauppauge HVR-1300
ATI Radeon HD 3200 Graphics
Display driver ATI Catalyst 9.8

[BigMoose]

A quick glance through your logs says it's a H264 channel and you're using CoreAVC - I've never got that to play nicely with skipping. Have you tried the Cyberlink H264 decoder? Works fine for me where CoreAVC does exactly as you have described.

[lyntonb]

Thanks for your reply. Yes I have tried each of the four cyberlink H.264 decoders listed in my config application with the same resulting problem. (I think they came from trial installations of PowerDVD 9 and PowerCinema 6).
Are you saying that Pause/resume, fastforward, and skip all work well on your setup? If so, I would love to know your particular mix of decoders, and any other settingsthat you think might have a bearing on this problem. I have spent hours trying to sort it out.

[BigMoose]

My setup does work but note that my H264 HD channels are AC3 sound where as I think from your logs that yours are AAC? (I've not rechecked your logs though so might have got that wrong). I use the PDVD8 H264 decoder which I've found the best (although it has its moments and I'd love to be able to try the new MPC decoder with live TV). I've read that PDVD9 doesn't allow external apps to use the decoder, so while you might set it, it's probably still using CoreAVC (the logs would confirm this) and I dont know about powercinema6... Is it old? I had PDVD7.3 working well but it didn't work on the Irish SD H264 channels where as PDVD8 works well. So I'd recommend trying to get hold of a PDVD8 H264 filter or PDVD7.3 and give them ago. You could try ffdshow just to see how it behaves, but I believe it's not entirely problem free. It might well give a different result for your skipping issue though to prove that it is CoreAVC causing your problems.

[Pob]

Yes I get the same issues with CoreAVC - but I still prefer it to other codecs I've tried. You can get around the delay after pausing or FF'ding by using the five-second skip back / forward buttons - I usually find that a couple of skips back, then forward, gets it playing again. Not ideal, but I've got used to it!
I would be very interested to hear how the Windows 7 built-in H264 decoder works - I see it is supported in the latest release. Anybody tried it on a Windows 7 beta?

[BigMoose]

I've read comments saying the built in win7 decoder is crap, but I've not tried it so could be wrong. I never got the skip back/forward method of getting CoreAVC to resume playback to work reliably so I gave up. Plus I've also never got acceptable deinterlacing on football pans with CoreAVC... Hence I dont believe the perfect H264 decoder esists!

[lyntonb]

Removing CoreAVC completely solved the pause/skip/rewind problem. It appears that even though I was selecting the Cyberlink H.264 decoder it was somehow defaulting to CoreAVC. So thanks for your help.
However, I do have a new problem! The Cyberlink H.264 decoder doesn't do a very good job at all with 1080i files (In NZ TV3 broadcasts in this format). Lots of juddering and sound sync problems. Any ideas? 720p files are fine.

[lyntonb]

I forgot to mention CoreAVC does a very good job with 1080i

[Pob]

Removing CoreAVC completely solved the pause/skip/rewind problem. It appears that even though I was selecting the Cyberlink H.264 decoder it was somehow defaulting to CoreAVC. So thanks for your help.
However, I do have a new problem! The Cyberlink H.264 decoder doesn't do a very good job at all with 1080i files (In NZ TV3 broadcasts in this format). Lots of juddering and sound sync problems. Any ideas? 720p files are fine.

Same problem I had with Cyberlink- all the UK HD broadcasts are 1080i also. Never could get it working properly - but others seem to get on with it somehow...

[JonnyCam]

The Cyberlink H.264 decoder doesn't do a very good job at all with 1080i files (In NZ TV3 broadcasts in this format).

What renderer are you using? I get great playback on TV3 using cyberlink along with EVR (no acceleration, as in XP, but no tearing.)