Choppy playback....

[big3b69]

I have noticed lately my recordings have not been very good at all, they are very choppy and sometimes do not playback at all. The logs I attached are right after I was recording WIBW channel 13.1 and KSNT channel 27.2. Also, while both channels are recording, if I try and navigate around in the menus or even in the tv listings, nPVR is very slow to respond. After I stop the recordings, everything is back to normal.I have tried different decoders and there is not much of change. Could it be that I am having difficulities with just one channel? Wibw 13.1, seems to give me the most hassel, over all.

I have a feeling that switching to Windows 7 may fix my issues, I just wish I could be sure before I spend that kind of money.

[Reddwarf]

I have noticed lately my recordings have not been very good at all, they are very choppy and sometimes do not playback at all. The logs I attached are right after I was recording WIBW channel 13.1 and KSNT channel 27.2. Also, while both channels are recording, if I try and navigate around in the menus or even in the tv listings, nPVR is very slow to respond. After I stop the recordings, everything is back to normal.I have tried different decoders and there is not much of change. Could it be that I am having difficulities with just one channel? Wibw 13.1, seems to give me the most hassel, over all.

I have a feeling that switching to Windows 7 may fix my issues, I just wish I could be sure before I spend that kind of money.

As a very first step you should try to update to the latest version (2.3.6), backup your program and data directory first just in case. You could also try to disable the TVListings plugin. Your cpu should be more that adequate, have you looked at the cpu load while these issue occur?

[big3b69]

I will try what you suggested this evening. I thought I was up to date on the version, guessed I missed something.

[big3b69]

OK I was at the most current version of Npvr, forgot to update that in the signature. I did disable the tvlistings plugin and I had the task mamanger running. When recording two channels, The CPU would jump anywhere from 60-100%, when recording one channel it was 60-70%.

[sub]

Your choppy play back is most likely just some playback issue coming down to the video decoder and/or renderer you're using.

Recording a digital channel has very low overhead, maybe 5% or so CPU usage. Recording an analog channel with a hardware encoder (like PVR150 etc) uses a similar amount of CPU. Recording an analog channel with a soft encoder device can use quite a bit of CPU (exact amount will vary depending on CPU).

[big3b69]

Sounds like a have to play some more with the decoders, like I thought, I just wanted to be sure I was on the right track.

[athomas]

I tried for quite a while to get rid of choppiness in my recordings. Even when my system resource usage was low, it would skip frames every so often in fast scenes. It turned out to be an issue with my Pure Video codec and hardware decoding. It actually worked better when I disabled the hardware decoding and used software decoding. Even then, I would get random unexplained skips in some scenes and it didn't matter what codec or video card I used.

The biggest improvement in performance came with Windows 7. It handles video so much better. I haven't had a display issue since I installed it.

[big3b69]

Gonna try the purevideo hd decoder. The one I had may have been out of date.

[stustunz]

what content are you playing?
ie SD, HD, h264,mpeg

what renderer are you using (dont use evr if on xp try vmr custom or fse if you dont care that it will take over everything on screen)

[big3b69]

I am playing hd from over the air. I had the evr renderer at first but I think it is just vmr9.