Choppiness in HD recordings

[Torquewrench]

Hi,

I'm running an HVR-2250 and an HVR-1600 recording to a 750GB SATA hard disk on an AMD Phenom based motherboard, and I occassionally get choppiness during some parts of HD recordings. I'm guessing that the system was taxed during the recording process, perhaps the hard disk was working hard at something else and was unavailable to record, but whatever the cause it's really annoying! Rewinding the recording and playing again will exhibit the same choppiness, it's in the recording.

Anyone else experience this behavior and if so, is there a remedy? Perhaps placing the recording service at a higher priority?

Thanks for any help,

Phil/TW

[psycik]

What sort of HD recordings? h.264? if so, then likely that your video card is a little small.

The 8500 Series and above were generally accepted as the minimum required for H.264 video onboard the GPU.

[Torquewrench]

These are straight off the air recordings from unencrypted QAM256 cable TV source, so I'm not sure what that means in terms of codec. The motherboard I use incorporates an nVidia 9300, and as I said, it appears the choppiness occurs in the recording, not in playback because it playsback the same every time.

[JonnyCam]

could it be a signal problem also? Does it pixelate at all?

You can make the recording service run at a higher priority - it's in config.xml
and called something like:
<RecordingServiceHighPriorty>false</RecordingServiceHighPriority>

(it's not actually called that, or maybe I am thinking of only the MVP & Client modes. )
Open the config.xml in notepad and do a search for priority

[imagn]

I think this has more to do with you video card and playback than your system being taxed while it is recording. Generally recording tv is very light on cpu. Watching HDTV is pretty heavy on the CPU and Video card. I am not sure how good an onboard 8300 is and it may not be up to the task of playing the file.

Also how are you playing the recording, is this on a server machine (the machine the recording are stored) or is this a client set up and the network is involved.

I would try some different codecs for playback, try different renderes like EVR and see what that gets you. I have good playback with the MPC-HC codecs on my laptop that has onboard intel video, but the CPU hovers around 90% sometimes and can get choppy on some playbacks.

[Torquewrench]

I could be wrong but I really don't think this is a playback problem, as I don't routinely see pixelation even when watching recorded TV or high bitrate bluray rips.

I will see the hard disk going full tilt (solid blue LED) and I think this might be when the recordings get recorded choppily. If I am recording two programs and one finishes in the middle of the other and write a ton of data to the hard disk, could this screw up recording? I am not running comskip though I am running smart archiver, but that is scheduled to run in the middle of the night.

I will look for the recording service priority in config.xml and let you know how it goes.

[sub]

Maybe check your disk isnt to fragmented. This can negatively affect I/O performance, and has in a few cases led to recording problems in the past.

[BigMoose]

Does it happen when you are only recording one thing or when you're recording >1 or watching and recording? Is your SATA disk in IDE or AHCI mode? I had stutterings in recordings when I had the disk in IDE mode and I was recording 2 things at once and watching another. AHCI mode has solved that.

[athomas]

I have the same Asus motherboard with the 8300 onboard video. It works great for HD. What video driver are you running? I had to go back to an earlier version when running XP. The newer 190 series was giving me choppy video. I think I rolled back to about 185... or 186.... The performance increase was huge.

Disk fragmentation can hurt performance. This can also be exaggerated if two recordings are happening or if playing a file and recording at the same time.

[Torquewrench]

I'll check the driver version, but my guess is I'm at something like 190. I am definitely recording multiple streams at one time and sometimes watching one.

If that is the cause, how do I make that a non-issue? I must not be the only one recording and watching multiple streams, right?