Need some suggestions - I lose audio, then video freezes, and PVRX2 locks up

[Bob The Great]

Howdy guys. I've got things almost completely working, with only a couple of issues. I'm out of ideas on this one though, and I'm hoping someone has some suggestions for me.

I have an HVR-1800 set up on my file-server, and I'm streaming SD Analog and QAM to a client on my main computer.

When playing QAM channels, after about 15-20min of playing just fine, I suddenly lose audio, then several seconds later, the video freezes, and PVRX2 stops responding. I've tried the CyberLink, ATI, and Nvidia PureVideo decoders, and they all do it, though the Nvidia one lasts the longest. Occasionally, I've had the video freeze first, but generally the audio is the first to go.

This doesn't seem to happen on analog channels, but it happens on all the QAM's.

I don't know if it matters, but I'm using the CyberLink PP MPEG Muxer 5.0.1228. Logs are attached, if anyone knows what to look for.

On a side note, are there any tips for improving client response time? It takes about 20seconds to load the EPG when the program first starts up, and almost 10seconds for each channel change. These are both instantaneous when done on the server.

[Bob The Great]

Update: It seems to be intermittant now. I've been able to watch a QAM channel for a couple of hours without issue, and then I'll try another one and it dies, as described above. It's not tied to a particular channel - just seems to be the luck of the draw.

I want to get this running stable - what can I try?

[sub]

I'd try the DVR-MS mux. The Cyberlink mux is known to lockup sometimes with high def channels.

[Bob The Great]

Thanks, I'll give that a shot.

[Bob The Great]

Well, that changed stuff. With the DVR-MS mux selected on both server and client, when tuning to QAM channels only, I get a buffer overrun. Analog still works fine.

[sub]

Sorry, I was skim reading and didnt realise you were using a client PC. You can only use .mpg files in streaming mode, so .dvr-ms isnt a great option for you.

Sorry, I dont really have any other suggestions for you. I know the client/server stuff isnt very reliable for high def content.

[Bob The Great]

aha! I guess I'll try some more flavors of the Cyberlink muxes, and see if any of them work better. I've heard the ATI ones don't play well with Nvidia cards and PureVideo

[Bob The Great]

I think I figured it out. I'm doing some stress testing now to verify.

I switched to the ppMpgMux(5.0.0.3608), which helped a bit, but I still had stuttering problems, and the occasional freeze.

But, I think the real problem was that I was running in windowed mode, which seems to force a 4x3 aspect ratio. I had the aspect ratio in Config set to 16x10, so it was having to re-scale on the fly to fit the 4x3 window. Apparently, this wasn't a problem with a SD Analog feed, but with the HD QAM channels the re-scaling couldn't keep up.

I'm now running windowed mode with a 4x3 aspect ratio set in Config, and thus far, all it well *knock on wood*. Hopefully, that will take care of it.

[edit] I also had to change <ClientModeLiveTVPrePlayDelay> to 5000 to get rid of the last bits of stutter during fast motion (explosions, fight scenes, etc).