Dvico Fusion 5 Lite and cpu usage

[rgann]

I have seen a couple threads on the board where people mention they were able to get a system with a Dvico Fusion 5 lite card working well under gbpvr. On my system, the FusionHDTV program works without issue, at no more than 65% cpu usage. However, gbpvr is pretty much locked at 100% cpu usage while viewing hdtv.

The machine has a not-too-brawny Athlon XP 2400+ @ 2 Ghz, but it's also not terrible. I have tried both available playback video decoders (Intervideo NonCss and Zulu BDA) and both VMR9 and Overlay modes. All permutations of these produce stuttering on LiveTV that is apparently due to cpu overload.

Is gbpvr doing more stuff than the FusionHDTV program, resulting in higher cpu usage? If so, should I content myself to only recording HDTV using gbpvr, and playback on a different machine? I'd love some advice from those who've had success.

Thanks

[zed]

I had a Fusion 5 Lite for a while and also noticed jerky playback when viewing recorded shows and live TV. Not sure about the cpu usage but I found that I could view them just fine using Windows Media Player. I believe GB-PVR uses the same components as WMP so there's probably something more going on. My system is a 3GHz P4/HT...definitely not wimpy.

[daphatty]

While I never have monitored my CPU usage, there is definitely a difference between the F5 in GBPVR and natively in the DViCO player. IMO, I think it's the drivers but that's just me. What are the rest of your PVR's specs? The CPU is really only one part of the equation.

[rgann]

Thanks for the replies.

System specs:
AMD Athlon XP 2400+ @ 2 Ghz
Nforce2 chipset motherboard with built-in C-media card
256 MB RAM
Tuners: Hauppauge PVR 250 and the Dvico card
Video: Geforce fx 5200
200G seagate harddrive
Windows XP SP2

I don't know if this matters, but to actually get the dvico card working even in its own program, I had to change my computer from ACPI to Standard PC because of an apparent IRQ conflict. Ever since then, though, performance in Fusion has been wonderful.

[daphatty]

256 MB RAM

:eek: :eek: :eek: :eek:

IMHO, this is insufficient memory for HD tuning. My PVR was running a single stick of 256 MB of DDR266 when I dropped my F5 in and the card wouldn't even run. I was forced to pull a 256 chip out of my main PC to get the F5 working and ultimately bought 1GB of DDR333 RAM for my HTPC. Now it runs like a champ.

[rgann]

ok, I'll buy 1 gig pc 3200 and try it out. Thanks

[rgann]

daphatty:

While it does seem better with the 1 gig RAM, the picture is still very jerky. Could it have to do with the video card? Other than that, our systems are almost identical.

[fmriguy]

I'm in virtually the same situation as rgann, with an almost identical system. When I try to play an HD mpeg through GBPVR, the video is very choppy. I tried the Zulu, Intervideo, and Nvidia decoders and all were equally choppy. For some reason, when using the Cyberlink decoder, the playback was *almost* perfectly smooth, but the actual video quality was poor (e.g. lots of pixellation and blurring). When using the Cyberlink decoder, CPU utilization was at about 97%.

Now here's the strange thing. When loading the same mpeg file in Cyberlink PowerDVD, the video seems to slow so much that you only see maybe 5 frames/sec.

Of course, I'm having a whole other set of problems. I can't even view live HDTV through GBPVR (always BSOD). And everytime (except for one time) that I have tried to record, GBPVRrecordingservice.exe has a memory execution error and BSOD (which mentions the ZuluTcap.sys file).

Everything works fine in the DVICO Fusion software and uses 65% cpu as rgann said.

BTW, i'm running Windows 2000 SP4.

I'm at a loss and somewhat bummed, because I love GBPVR for analog!

[daphatty]

daphatty:

While it does seem better with the 1 gig RAM, the picture is still very jerky. Could it have to do with the video card? Other than that, our systems are almost identical.

What mux are you running on your PC? (Run MUX checker from the GBPVR folder to find out.)

@fmriguy - Your symptoms sound like the IRQ problem that others have experienced. Have you tried disabling ACPI and/or dedicating an IRQ to your DViCO card yet?

[rgann]

daphatty: I'm using Cyberlink MPEG Muxer version 5.0.0727, apparently. Is there a better one to use?

fmriguy: I'm not sure that your problem does sound like the IRQ conflict problem I had. When I had the conflict, the video stuttered inside Dvico's own application. However, a blue screen is certainly indicative of a hardware issue. Can you record thru the Dvico software? If so, can you play that file back in Gbpvr or WMP?