I just installed 5.5 and everything seems to be working well, except for playback of recordings. Standard def recording plays back pretty well, but anything recorded in high def starts out very choppy, and then after 30 seconds or so, it smooths out, but is still slightly choppy. I've tried going through the settings, and have it set on playback for CPU--. Until I did this, hd playback was not possible without major choppiness. Anytime the OSD comes up, it really takes a hit as well also.

Here is some basic system info
Dell Optiplex GX260
2.5 GHz P4
768MB ram
Nvidia GEForce 4 MX 440 128MB DVI, DVI to HDMI cable to TV
120GB HD, DMA is enabled on it
PcHDTV HD-5500 recording card

I know I could probably stand to add more ram, 768 is just what I had on hand, and it seemed to run ok with R5F27, but I remember having to do some tweaking to get it to run, but that was too long ago to remember.

Thanks in advance

Is XvMC enabled?

Mike

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LinHES 7.4
Australian Dragon
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I had a devil of a time getting XvMC working with those %#@@!~!$#%# playback profiles in R5.5. I finally created a new profile that essentially said that if the video is greater than 0x0, use XvMC, dammit. That finally worked.

I'm sure those profiles are good and powerful -- but some of us just want to watch TV, not futz with poorly explained settings by trial and error.

/rant off

Sorry about that. Yeah, manicmike is on the right track -- make sure your XvMC is enabled. Is your OSD grey or blue?

I played with a 2.6ghz optiplex and an FX5200 installed on R5.5. Here are some observations I made when playing back 1080i content to a 720p display:

1. If I enabled Hyper Threading in the BIOS, set max-cpus =2 in the playback profile and enabled XVMC, the frontend would die as soon as I attempted to play anything. Reducing max CPU's to 1 solved the problem.

2. XVMC + 1 CPU serves the same basic purpose as using HT, if your CPU supports HT. ie, Either way, you get additional processing power added to the mix. In the case of XVMC, the additional processing power cycles comes from the graphics card's processor; in the case of HT, you are getting additional processing cycles from your intel CPU. I found HT gave me a better result than XVMC.

3. I could not use bob2x deinterlacing with the FX5200 -- some sort of warning in the front end logs about not being able to go to that high of a framerate. In the end, I was stuck using the 1-field deinterlacer. My brother was able to get bob2x to work fine with his optiplex 3.0ghz machine + FX6200 card.

What deinterlacer are you using now, what deinterlacer did you use before, what is the resolution of your content and what is the resolution of your display?

Marc

Might also want to check out thisthread. While he didn't solve the problem, he does talk about some settings that improved things.

Sorry for the slow response, but here is where I am currently at:

I upgraded the nvidia drivers, and that did seem to make a slight improvement.

I've got the blue OSD currently.

I haven't yet found a playback profile that is without flaws. I've tried to create my own, but it has the same problems as other existing profiles. One profile will work ok, but then I get to another recorded show, it will playback choppy. What I don't know how to do is figure out what each individual show is recording at what resolution, and then figure out what the profile is using to playback. Any guidance on that?

Did you ensure that Hyper Threading was enabled in the bios?



To provide meaningful help, I'll need the following info:

1. What country are you in?

2. Are you recording OTA (Over The Air) or cable?

3. What resolution are you driving your display device at?

4. Is your display device progressive scan or interlaced?

If your displaying HD, I would consider replacing the MX 440 with an FX 6200 -- you can find a low-profile FX6200 AGP 8x card out there for $40 - $50. Here's onefor $40 that would work well if you need DVI output. Be sure to order the appropraite low-profile bracket if you are using a small form factor optiplex.

Marc

US

OTA

I'll have to get back to you on that, I'm limited to an ssh connection here, and can't figure out how to get the current resolution


720 progressive scan

OK, please check your hyper threading setting in the bios. Turn it on, but please also let me know what it was set to.

In UTILS/SETUP->SETUP->TV Settings->Playback->Playback Profiles (screen 3), you need to create a new Video Playback Profile with the following 3 entries. In theory they can be created in any order, but as a precaution, please create them in the following order:

1. Match Criteria1 >= 1280 720, Match Criteria2 < 1920 1080, decoder=standard, MAX CPUs=2, video renderer=xv-blit, osd-renderer=softblend, osd fade=NOT checked, primary deinterlacer=None, Fallback deinterlacer=None. FYI -- these settings will be used to play back 720p recordings.

2. Match Criteria1 >= 1920 1080, Match Criteria2 = blank, decoder=standard, MAX CPUs=2, video renderer=xv-blit, osd-renderer=softblend, osd fade=NOT checked, primary deinterlacer=One Field, Fallback deinterlacer=None. FYI -- these settings will be used to play back 1080i recordings.

3. Match Criteria1 < 1280 720, Match Criteria2 = blank, decoder=standard, MAX CPUs=2, video renderer=xv-blit, osd-renderer=softblend, osd fade=checked, primary deinterlacer=bob2x, Fallback deinterlacer=One Field. FYI - these settings will be used to play back 480i recordings.

Please let me know how this works out. Some additional observations:


1. Your CPU is borderline for hidef playback. You will not have success without HT or XVMC. In this configuration, we are trying to use HT instead of XVMC. If that does not work, we will try XVMC.

2. One field is not a great deinterlacer, but it should give you reasonable results and is the least CPU intensive of all the choices.

3. In your initial experiments, please watch an already recorded show while you are not recording anything else. Do not attempt to watch live TV to gauge if this helps. If playback works by itself, you can then move on to seeing how it does when recording while playing back a show; then while watching live TV.

4. It would be useful if you remote logged into your myth box, ran "top -d 1" and reported back the % idle time available while doing playback.

Marc

That did seem to help on the lower end recordings, but the high def stuff is still choppy.

When running top while watching a pre-recorded show, I was suprised to see cpu running about 90-92%, but that does make sense. I guess I am still amazed that 2.5GHz can't do everything (My first processor was a 286 running 16Hz) I have a little faster cpu to swap in (2.8GHz) which probably won't help much, but it will give it a little boost.

I'm not worried about watching livetv, I just let the tuner on my tv handle that, since I like to put as little strain on the mythbox as possible.

I think after swapping the CPU's, I'll mess more with the recording profiles a little more. No point capturing in full 1080 if I'm only displaying on a 720 display.

More to delve into for me... including the aspect ratios which are driving me crazy...

mtotsch, did you enable hyper threading? If you did, when you run top you should see CPU utilization exceeding 100% -- adding up the top 4-5 processes will probably add up to something between 120% - 160%...

Marc

I looked in the bios, and then checked online, and after looking, hyperthreading wasn't available in cpu's until the 3.06GHz P4's. Or am I missing something?

I have a 2.6ghz optiplex gx270 that has HT option, so it was definitely available in earlier CPU models than you are assuming, but that doesn't mean your machine has it. This is unfortunate, as HT makes a massive difference. If you've checked all the settings in your BIOS and haven't found it, then perhaps your CPU doesn't have this option. There are two more things you can try short of making a hardware change. I am not able to access my machine at the moment, so I may not have identified the exact wording for the decoder changes, but should be close enough to get you to the right setting:

1. Change the settings for 720p and 1080i playback to use decoder="Standard XVMC". I know you tried XVMC before, but keep in mind that we have changed other settings, including the deinterlace method, so it's worth trying again.

2. If that doesn't work, change the settings for 720p and 1080i playback to use the decoder="libmpeg2"

I have edited my earlier post that contained the various settings to clearly identify which 2 of the 3 settings are used for 720p and 1080i.

Marc

Ok, after doing some searching, it looks like the GX260's don't have it, but the GX270's do. I may have to do some scavenging to find one to try.

while searching to resolve a choppy playback found your thread.

just making some comments.

The first HT processor out of Intel was the 3.06G it ran on 533mhz FSB
I believe these were pin compatible with the previous versions, but unless Bios allowed it you wouldn't have the bus speed or even possibly the options to take advantage of the HT functions.

IN a very short timeframe from there Intel introduced HT cpu's with clock speeds all the way back to 2.4 Gig however their FSB was 800mhz so would not be backwards compatible.

It was also right around this time they changed the socket yet again. to I believe the LGA 775.

This is one example where that info comes from.
http://www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/quickreffam.htm

In some ways you may even today have an option, but it might also be easier to build at least a fast single core or a Core 2 to take advantage of the HD playback.

Definitely not trying to Hijack the thread.