Live TV Stutters when OSD open

[DEfusion]

Hi there,

I've just built my PVR today, and I'm really impressed with GB-PVR so far.

However, whenever I turn the OSD on while watching live TV I get a slight jutter (freeze frame for about 3 frames) every second or so, when the OSD is off I don't get any jutters.

This does not appear to be happening when watching some divX & xVid files I have in my library.

My setup is:

PVR 250
ATI Radeon 7000 (Omega drivers)
1 ghz AMD processor
768Mb Ram (133 I think)
Soundblaster 24bit 7.1

I have a maxtor 80Gb drive split into 4 partions (d,e,f are pretty much empty and all defragged) of:

C: 9Gb System
D: 4.5Gb Page file & liveTV
E: 24Gb Applications
F: 35Gb Recorded files

I've tried playing around with most of the options but nothing seems to have fixed it, I haven't tried ffdshow but I'm not sure if that's just used for decoding already encoded files or not.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

-D

[capone]

Your computer isn't that fast. Not sure you can do much else. If that's the worst your problems, nice rig otherwise.

[sub]

Sound like your machine is almost not up to it. Try a different video decoder. Some use less CPU.

Also, you could try switching to Overlay instead of VMR. It doesnt look as nice, but it much easier on your system.

[movie_lover]

DEfusion,

My setup is very similar to yours - except that I have a PVR 350 and a Geforce 5200.

I experience exactly the same stuttering when the OSD is on, so I think that sub is correct in his "Sound like your machine is almost not up to it." diagnosis.

Still, I've built a fully functioning PVR/media centre form a machine that was gathering dust in the attic merely by adding a TV capture card and a new HDD.

I'm stoked!

[DEfusion]

Changing to overlay didn't make any difference.

The only option I have under Video decoder is InterVideo Non CSS... but this doesn't seem to change anything (I'm guessing that's the system default).

Under the hardware decoders I only have the ones for PVR 350 & Sigma XCard. However the Radeon 7000 has hardware decoding built in, is there any way I could use that?

What about FFDShow, will that make a difference - I haven't tried yet.

If all else fails I may upgrade my bios so I can put a slightly more powerful CPU in as they're so cheap anyway.

Thanks for your help so far,

-D

[DEfusion]

OK I've spent a bit longer playing around with it, I've had Task Manager running in the background and although I do see spikes when the Guide first opens the CPU settles down again, there doesn't seem to be a correlation between CPU spikes & these stutters.

I changed some settings under the Live Preview Mode (changed deinterlacing) and some settings caused it to be worse (None, Deinterlace filter). But the ffdshow raw video filter did seem to improve it a bit, not much though, over Encoder pass-through.

I haven't had FFD installed for a few years now so I'm not sure where to start with the myriad of options, does anyone have any ideas if I can tweak FFD to fix this problem?

On a slightly related note I installed Media Portal to see how that would cope (I tried both that & gbpvr before I built my PVR) and it stutters a lot worse with the overlay. But also using it again reminded me why I chose gbpvr over it.

Anyway I'm open for any suggestions to get rid of this little niggle.

-D

[sub]

I dont think I'd bother playing with FFDShow if I were, as nearly feature it provides requires much more CPU than you have. It's video processing adds quite a bit of addition CPU usage. It's only like to make things worse.

If switching to Overlay didnt help, they only other options left for you is upgrade you CPU, or try changing to a different video decoder to see if it helps. It sounds like your machine only has the 'InterVideo NonCSS' decoder, so you'll need to try and find some other your can install.

Under the hardware decoders I only have the ones for PVR 350 & Sigma XCard. However the Radeon 7000 has hardware decoding built in, is there any way I could use that?

The Radeon 7000 doesnt really have a MPEG2 hardware decoder built. It has a few special features which can be used to 'assist' the MPEG2 decoding process. You'd still need a software decoder install. If you're lucky though, the software decoder you install will know how to utilitize this 'hardware assist' functions and save your machine a few % of CPU cycles - its not a drastic improvement.

Before you ask...no, I dont which decoders might be able to use this hardware assist. I know with the NVidia cards the NVidia decoder uses it, but I'm not sure when it comes to ATI.

[capone]

I have a 1.75 processor, 1Gb of ram, and a nvidia 5600 w/ 256Mb ram. I get a brief stutter when I open, too. It's just one of those things. If you build a faster machine than that, you may be able to eliminate it.

[DEfusion]

It's not the stutter when I open the OSD I'm bothered about, it's the constant stutters while its open, I also get a similar stuttering when I timeshift TV.

Also I've just started to notice some very slightly stuttering when watching recorded programs.

So I tried to see if I could find an ATI decoder, I installed the media centre for the Radeon & in it's diagnostics I get:

Available MPEG Decorders:
(Decoders displayed in order of merit)
1)Name: 'ATI MPEG Video Decoder'
MPEG decoder supports DXVA:1
2)Name: 'InterVideo NonCSS Video Decoder for Hau...'
MPEG decoder supports DXVA:1


However I still cannot select the 'ATI MPEG Video Decoder' in the GBPVR config, I only get the InterVideo NonCSS... option.

-D

[sub]

To try this decoder to see if it helps, you could edit config.xml and add the 'ATI MPEG Video Decoder' to the <SupportedDecoders> setting.