Stuttering audio due to win7 bug (or drivers?)

[Barsk]

I have had some problems with stuttering audio in N-PVR for some time. I did however notice that the problems got worse and worse as time went. And I even got stuttering outside of N-PVR.
I had a suspicion that the OS or audio drivers where to blame since the stuttering got worse and worse, and no restart of N-PVR would help.

So I rebooted my HTPC and stuttering was gone. I am also using the audio patch that sub has dispatched so it may have helped with some of the original glitchy audio problems that others have too.

Now, before I try to find and update the audio drivers, that are now the Win 7 default drivers, I would like to get the input from the community. Is this something that has happened to others? Is there a common problem here with a common solution? I have some suspicions that there may be interrupt problems with the TV tuners and the audio device. But that is mere speculation. How do I test that?

I am on win 7 x64 with Realtec 883 audio.

[BigMoose]

I use win7 x64 pro with the on board VIA audio on the asus 785G board (spdif out). I had the audio deteriorating over time issue with my previous mb (780G with realtek audio) and 1.5.31 - but a restart of the channel (be that a pause/play or a stop/play) would cure it for another hour or so. GBPVR with the same OS/drivers never cause a problem at all, I could watch the same channels for hours with no issues. So I don't believe my issues are OS/driver related but an npvr one. With the new mb with VIA audio (and 1.5.33) I don't seem to have the deterioration over time, but some channels are unusable as they are so bad right from the start, but a pause/play fixes it and it then stays fine for the hour or more I've been watching. Oddly though with these bad channels they are sometimes slightly bad and sometimes terrible and I have no idea what makes them better/worse. Still, a pause/play makes them fine.

[Barsk]

I did get a bad stuttering from the channels that normally are fine when I had the situation mentioned above. Which was remedied by a reboot.
Have you tried rebooting to see if things clear up? If they do, we have a common problem. If not, then our problems are different.

[BigMoose]

The thing is I dont need to reboot to clear things up - a pause/play does the trick. Have you tried that? Hence I am sure my problems aren't OS related.

[IanJ]

It's not OS. With a previous rev of nPVR you could get rid of the stuttering by only selecting one audio decoder. With this latest rev that option is gone, it stutters all the time...........but here's the thing, it's very random, thus you can get the feeling very easily that you have fixed it, or found I way to keep it a bay.

If it was an OS problem there more than likely any app you used, not just nPVR, would show up the same problem.

Agree though, if you PAUSE/PLAY it does temporarily fix the problem......thus to me it's a buffering problem, or an interrupt issue.

sub will fix it........

Ian.

[BigMoose]

My degradation over time issue has gone in 1.5.33. Either it's crap when you start or its not. Unless the time period for degraded audio has extended beyond an hour or two (in which case I probably dont care ). I've not noticed a pause/play only give a temp fix, once it's OK it seems to stay that way (again for as long as I bother to watch which so far has been a couple of hours). I'll see how I get on over the long weekend here as to if my current observations are just random flukes The wife will soon let me know if it screws up her viewing!

[Reddwarf]

It's not OS. With a previous rev of nPVR you could get rid of the stuttering by only selecting one audio decoder. With this latest rev that option is gone, it stutters all the time...........but here's the thing, it's very random, thus you can get the feeling very easily that you have fixed it, or found I way to keep it a bay.

If it was an OS problem there more than likely any app you used, not just nPVR, would show up the same problem.

Agree though, if you PAUSE/PLAY it does temporarily fix the problem......thus to me it's a buffering problem, or an interrupt issue.

sub will fix it........

Ian.

I'v been testing if it has an impact what Audio Render you set, but since some channels works without stuttering, some stutters after a while and some stutter all the time it is hard to draw any bombastic conclutions. But Pause/Play does fix it for an hour or so.

[Barsk]

The thing is I dont need to reboot to clear things up - a pause/play does the trick. Have you tried that? Hence I am sure my problems aren't OS related.

Then we have different issues. With the stuttering that is caused by N-PVR a simple Pause/play fixes it. Especially on the PC client.
The problem this thread is all about is OS/driver/interrupt related stuttering. My stuttering gets worse and worse no matter how many play/pause until I reboot. Then it is a bay again for some hours or days. Then it starts to creep in. Very peculiar problem. I am thinking it has to do with my PCI/PCI-express tuners. I have a Terratec 2400 DT tuner that is a dual tuner on PCI-express. I had problems with that in XP too. When I used two tuners there was hickups in video stream. When I reinstalled with Win7 that problem went away. Now the problem is in audio. It may be related. But I am not sure.

[Reddwarf]

Then we have different issues. With the stuttering that is caused by N-PVR a simple Pause/play fixes it. Especially on the PC client.
The problem this thread is all about is OS/driver/interrupt related stuttering. My stuttering gets worse and worse no matter how many play/pause until I reboot. Then it is a bay again for some hours or days. Then it starts to creep in. Very peculiar problem. I am thinking it has to do with my PCI/PCI-express tuners. I have a Terratec 2400 DT tuner that is a dual tuner on PCI-express. I had problems with that in XP too. When I used two tuners there was hickups in video stream. When I reinstalled with Win7 that problem went away. Now the problem is in audio. It may be related. But I am not sure.

Have you looked into the BIOS if there are any settings you can fiddle with?

[Barsk]

Nothing other than the ordinary interrupt based settings that has been there since the DOS days. But those are supposed to be handled by the OS and plug-and-play nowdays.
I'll take a look though...

One way of testing is to move the devices physically between the PCI slots.