Intermittent Choppy/skipping recordings

[wtg]

I can watch live tv with no problem and record live tv, but if I schedule a recording it is messed up.

This doesn't make a lot of sense unless the problem is the destination drive. Is the temp directory used by live tv different from that used for your scheduled recordings? If so, it might be pointing to the source of the trouble.

Check the IO mode of the scheduled recording drive. Sometimes when Windows encounters an IO error it'll default that drive back to a lower speed IO mode and before you know, performance tanks.

[bwsaloum]

JC, I have an AMD 3000, 4 GB of RAM and when I'm recording it bounces between 50 & 80% utilization. When I watch live, CPU is pegged. I also have an older multi-cpu hyperthreading Dell Precision that exhibits the same thing, but much less dramatic. The Dell has 3 GB of RAM. Here's the rub: AMD has all SATA interfaces, while I'm using EIDE drives on the Dell.

Both are dedicated for video capture and replay and nobody is launching applications directly or remotely. I'm kind of puzzled about it all myself.

[wtg]

JC, I have an AMD 3000, 4 GB of RAM and when I'm recording it bounces between 50 & 80% utilization. When I watch live, CPU is pegged. I also have an older multi-cpu hyperthreading Dell Precision that exhibits the same thing, but much less dramatic. The Dell has 3 GB of RAM. Here's the rub: AMD has all SATA interfaces, while I'm using EIDE drives on the Dell.

Both are dedicated for video capture and replay and nobody is launching applications directly or remotely. I'm kind of puzzled about it all myself.

Any possibility you're running comskip automatically on recordings? If so, a pegged CPU while recording or watching live tv isn't surprising and generally doesn't affect the system either since comskip, if configured to "play nice", will yield the CPU back to the system or other processes.

[jd681]

I have noticed running a live HD feed that the CPU usuage goes pretty high as well. Not nearly as high on a .ts play back. I'm lucky that my video card is agp-8x on this older machine and supports Direct X 9.0c.(Geoforce 6600 256 MB ram) THE direct x 9.0c installed and it seems to throttle back the cpu usage some.

I'm using the Power DVD codec, which seems the most stable on playback.

Another thing was I had the DVD hotfix on the last install, this time around I skipped it to see what happens.

I do not believe I have the com-skip script installed.


A bit of free time, I used my other hard drive, formatted the machine with a fresh install, ran windows updates, installed the required software, installed Shark Codecs and I am up and running again.

Seems like good recordings now, time will tell with a few more scheduled HD channels.

I am guessing that the first go around, I had major issues trying out Media Portal, which blessing in disguise lead me to NPVR. With that said, I am wondering if there was some back end conflicts with the amount of MYSQL, .NET files and whatever else was left behind causing some issues after the media portal install.