Stuttering media center PC...

Nakatomi2010

I'm still a little new to the whole Media Center PC scene, I've been using my PC as my DVR for awhile now, but it seems lately, within the last 2 weeks I've been getting this stuttering issue whewre the video will freeze for a moment, and then it will stutter until it catches upagain and then be fluid... Nothing happens to the audio, strictly the video...


the big question here is that awhile back I noticed the video card fan was beginning to fail, making weird noises when starting up and such... Would an overheating, or "stressed" out video card cause this issue, or is this likely a software related issue?

Uncle Long

Nakatomi2010 wrote: »

I'm still a little new to the whole Media Center PC scene, I've been using my PC as my DVR for awhile now, but it seems lately, within the last 2 weeks I've been getting this stuttering issue whewre the video will freeze for a moment, and then it will stutter until it catches upagain and then be fluid... Nothing happens to the audio, strictly the video...


the big question here is that awhile back I noticed the video card fan was beginning to fail, making weird noises when starting up and such... Would an overheating, or "stressed" out video card cause this issue, or is this likely a software related issue?

It could be that your video card is just going bad. Are you having any other problems with the PC?

vonPoonBurGer

I could be a number of things, but video card is most likely. There's a bunch of stuff you can check out before you buy new hardware though:

- Is your physical I/O bandwidth saturated?
Assuming this is a Windows system, you can open up Performance Monitor by going to Start > Run > perfmon. If you don't see Avg. Disk Queue Length already in the list of active counters, right click the graph and select Add Counters. Under the Performance Object dropdown, select LogicalDisk, and pick Avg. Disk Queue Length from the list of counters. Once it's actively monitoring the disk queue length, minimize the Performance Monitor and watch a movie in your standard player until you see some video stuttering. Pause the movie, switch back to perfmon, and see if you're consistently running with an average disk queue over zero. For systems that aren't I/O saturated, you should see the queue length sitting at zero most of the time, with occasional brief spikes. If you're consistently running with queued disk requests, your I/O system isn't keeping up, and either there are problems with your hard drive or its controllers, or you need faster drives and/or controllers. It could also be the case that having too little memory is causing swapping to disk, which can also cause persistent disk queuing; see the next item.

- Are you running out of memory and swapping to disk?
You can get this info from perfmon, but it's easier to just use Task Manager. Ctrl-Alt-Del to get that open, or right-click the Taskbar and select Task Manager. Switch to the Performance tab and note the Available number under Physical Memory. Also note the Page File Usage History graph. Minimize Task Manager, open up your media player, and watch a video until you see some stuttering. Pause it, switch back to Task Manager, and check the available physical memory. Is it at 100000 or less (i.e. 100MB or less)? Do you see a jump in page file usage from around the time the stuttering occurs? If so, you're running out of physical memory, which causes Windows to swap to disk. Disk is far slower than physical RAM, so swapping to disk can easily cause dropped frames. Ideally, you want to have at least a couple hundred megabytes of free RAM at any given time. If you don't have that, RAM is relatively inexpensive and easy to add, and often the best all around performance upgrade for a system.

- Is your CPU pegged?
While you're checking out Task Manager, take a look at the CPU Usage History graph. Are you hitting 100% CPU usage for any extended period of time? It takes CPU horsepower to decode AVIs and MPEGs into something your graphics card can display. If video playback pins your CPU at 100%, even for brief periods of time, you're likely to see dropped frames. The solution to this one, obviously, is to get a faster CPU. Newer codecs may also help though. If you're using out of date codecs, it's possible that newer versions will run more efficiently, so try updating those before you drop coin on a new processor. I've been using the FFDShow codec pack on my HTPC for some time now, with good results.

If it doesn't look like I/O saturation, insufficient memory, or inadequate processing power, then it's probably the video card. If all you're doing with this system is media center stuff, you can replace the video card with something really inexpensive, because it doesn't take a lot of graphics oomph to do video playback. I use a GeForce 6200 in my HTPC, they cost ~$50, come in both AGP and PCI-E flavors, most models support component/S-Video/composite out, and they have native support for HDTV resolutions. Some models also have no fan since the chip generates relatively little heat, which is great for HTPC applications: less ambient noise when you're watching videos, and it's one less fan that can possibly fail on you.

Nakatomi2010

In case anyone was wodnering...

I went into the task manager and took a good long look, and then told it to show me all proceses by all users...

I noticed SVCHSOT.exe consuming 100% CPU resources, using the nifty "Got to service" feature I was able to go directly to the right services that were running... Then while stopping a bunch of them I realized the Readyboost service was not stopping proeprly... I set it to manual in the services.msc screen and rebooted... Problem should go away now....

As an added bonus, I was having issues with getting Media Center to download the new guide for the last 3 days... Setting the Readyboost service to manual also seems to have resolved this issue too....

I'm just happy I figure it out now though... YAY.....