HTPC choppy, CPU maxed out?

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haxxorboi

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 21, 2007
Messages
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So I just got a 46" Sharp Aquos d6u, AMAZING monitor!! I've had my little HTPC feeding a CRT in my room for about a year and it did just fine at 1280x1024, but I'm having some major issues with BTV and 1080p now, and I can't decide which component I need to upgrade... so I was hoping for some insight...

Specs:
Athlon 3500+ OCed to 2.7GHz, runs stable and cool with Zalman HSF
ATi AIW 2006 Edition
1GB Corsair Value Ram (DDR 400mhz)
300 GB Maxtor
Latest BTV stable (4.7 or something like that)

I have no problem running video, DVDs, or playing games through it at 1080p. However, when I open up BTV it takes around 45-60seconds to get through the loading screen, and then will be choppy when watching TV (both audio and video) until it will settle down and then just the audio is choppy.

I've had a similar problem before with the CRT where if I did almost anything else on the PC, BTV wouldn't record the shows right and watching while recording was almost unheard of... Now I can however use TitanTV and playback is fine.

Task Manager reports that the BTV recording engine is using about 50% of the proc and BTV 3d shell uses another 40% after it will settle down.

I'm assuming the problem lies with the tuner as it has no hardware encode/decode and all this is passed to the CPU, but does anyone think this could be an issue with CPU inadequacy? If so I could always upgrade to a 4200X2, however I'm hoping to avoid extra expenditures.

So what do your guys think? Any questions/comments/concerns are appreciated greatly, thanks in advance!
 
nobody_here said:
might be time to consider a dual core CPU methinks

and what is BTV?
Click to expand...

BTV is Beyond TV, sorry, should have specified that... While the dual core would definitely help with the overhead running taxation I just seem to have an issue with the fact that I can run CoD4 and Supreme Commander on the PC and it doesn't even max out the CPU, albeit with only medium graphics...

My other question, which I forgot to ask, is what tuners are you guys having good luck with... I've used AIW forever and never used a dedicated card, but it's time for a change...

I'm currently looking at the Hauppauge HVR-1600 v. 1178 as it has clearQAM capability and I can still run standard definition analog (as that's what I have for now) but still have dual tuner capability and, once I get the money, a nice HD OTA antenna for the free OTA in my area.
 
It's probably not your hard drive or your memory if you had no problems before. If it's your CPU open task manager and start everything up and see if it gets pegged at 100%. If that's the case it is the offload to the CPU from your AIW that's the problem.

As for an upgrade on capture card, I think you might have problems with HD playback on the system. But I have yet to try any HD HTPC stuff.
 
I would say, double your ram, and do a dual core. HD seems to bog systems down a lot and you might want to try to beef up your system. A good dual core will do that.

My new upgrade for my HTPC is an Opteron 175 with 2GB ram, and dual 160GB HDs. That and I am moving to a 16x DVDRW drive instead of my old 4x. And my motherboards optical sound out instead of a Fortissimo III 7.1 card. Along with an Asus A8N Sli Premium, and a Blue Orb.

I'm just waiting on the new PSU to arrive so I can see how the new setup works.
 
I'd be willing to bet that it's the AIW; the AIW is doing a few things, first it's your video card and second it's your tuner. To work as a tuner it's offloading encoding to your CPU as well as accelerating playback (if you're using MPEG2) while also drawing and adding in post processing effects (ATI is pretty keen on doing this a lot to clean up the video quality). Your CPU is handling all of the video encoding which isn't a good thing already.

If you get a hardware encoding card it leaves the video card to handle just the video out aspect as well as playback (which is pretty easy for it) instead of adding in having to handle the tuner aspect. Second a hardware tuner isn't going to be hammering your CPU all the time so much.

You might be able to handle HD content (OTA ATSC tuners) but you'll need to upgrade your video card to something that is atleast a 7600GT level (8500GT should do it) and a dual core CPU (although I can just barely do 720p content with my 3200+) but no way is it going to be possible with your AIW card due to it eating up your CPU already.
 
I'd also agree with the graphics being the problem. That AIW is a fairly wimpy card in the graphics world unfortunately. I seem to recall that it's built on a 9xxx series GPU which would put it on par with NVIDIA's 6xxx series. As suggested above, you should probably upgrade that to get smooth playback.
 
i would grab a dual core CPU like the 4200+ X2 you mentioned and a 8600GT or HD2600XT or HD3850, all of those have hardware decoding built in leaving the CPU free to do other things
 
Hurdler said:
I'd also agree with the graphics being the problem. That AIW is a fairly wimpy card in the graphics world unfortunately. I seem to recall that it's built on a 9xxx series GPU which would put it on par with NVIDIA's 6xxx series. As suggested above, you should probably upgrade that to get smooth playback.
Click to expand...

If it's AGP then it's a 9600 XT which is fairly slow by todays standards (and I'm not talking gaming prowess here, simply as an HTPC card) and if it's PCIe then it's going to be a X1300.
 
It's the AIW. It doesn't have a hardware mpeg2 encoder which makes your CPU do the work. I would opt for a separate tuner and video card setup. Get something like a Hauppauge WinTV-PVR. All the newer ones come with a hardware mpeg2 encoder. You can still use the AIW as the graphics card if you want, or you can go for something else - I would.
 
even the 8400gs or the x2400 cards will do magnitudes of order better than your current video card, at offloading from the CPU all of the video decompression. Combine a newer video solution with a hardware encoding tuner, like a Hauppage, or an ATi Theater 550 or 650 (if you want HDTV capability) to get the most life out of your system. If you're PCI-E, great, if not, both of the video cards are available in AGP form (IIRC). tuners are available in PCI and PCI-E formats as well. That CPU will be fine to record shows, probably up to 3 at a time, but using BTV's showsqueeze will kill it. You're going to have to turn showsqueeze off if you record constantly. If you don't what you'll end up with is a bunch of shows that are waiting to be converted to a compressed format. If you have a dual core, and more ram, you could leave showsqueeze on. As it is, I'd recommend just recording in MPEG-2 format, and either dumping them to another machine for editing and format conversion, or pulling them over the network to do this.
 
meh, that's kinda what I expected... I currently only have money for one card, so I'll go tuner for now (Hau. HVR-1600 perhaps, seems most promising, or maybe 650) and then upgrade the proc and video card down the road a little bit...

Thanks for the help guys, makes me feel more safe... I've been working on PCs for over 7 years and I'm only now starting to venture into HTPC territory, so I'm still a little shaky...

Thanks again
 
i had a amd 3200+ oc to 2.4GHz back then running BTV, it would lag if i tried to watch tv and browse the net at the same time. get choppy recording like you.

i upgraded to a x2 3800+ oc to 2.5Ghz and the lag/choppyness is completely gone 90% of the time. i'm pretty sure if i slapped in a C2D it would be smooth sailing.

i am also running a ati hd tuner card if that matters with 2 gig ram.
 
haxxorboi ---

BeyondTV runs a library process every 30 seconds. On my Athlon X2 4200+ that process takes up 28% (more or less) of the total CPU cycles for a noticable amount of time (performance monitor).

I have a lot of hard drives and a lot of recordings so the library process may be using more resources than on your system.

In any case, the library process may be causing the stuttering.
 
Hurdler said:
I'd also agree with the graphics being the problem. That AIW is a fairly wimpy card in the graphics world unfortunately. I seem to recall that it's built on a 9xxx series GPU which would put it on par with NVIDIA's 6xxx series. As suggested above, you should probably upgrade that to get smooth playback.
Click to expand...

BTV will play back standard def and hi-def (OTA cap'ed) just fine on an Athlon 3000 w/ 1GB of RAM using a Radeon 9600. I know this because I've done it before. That is not your issue.

If you only have one stream recording and playing back (the 9600), that should also NOT be your issue, as I've used that AIW just fine with BTV (though its been a few versions since I've used it)

I presume your HDD is set to use Ultra DMA...

Do you have a virus scanner running? If so, have you excluded the BTV directories from the real time scan?

The tuner should be a good upgrade to get some hardware encoding action (and HD signal).

But for those doubters out there, in the past, I've used with BTV 3.7, an Athlon 1700+ w/ 512mb of RAM, and it had a PVR-500 and an AIW9600. I could record 3 shows at once without issues, and watch them as well, however I pleased.
 
I had a similar problem and I switched from Beyond TV to GBPVR and alot of it went away. Maybe I just got lucky. Shrug.
 
Schro said:
BTV will play back standard def and hi-def (OTA cap'ed) just fine on an Athlon 3000 w/ 1GB of RAM using a Radeon 9600. I know this because I've done it before. That is not your issue.

If you only have one stream recording and playing back (the 9600), that should also NOT be your issue, as I've used that AIW just fine with BTV (though its been a few versions since I've used it)

I presume your HDD is set to use Ultra DMA...

Do you have a virus scanner running? If so, have you excluded the BTV directories from the real time scan?

The tuner should be a good upgrade to get some hardware encoding action (and HD signal).

But for those doubters out there, in the past, I've used with BTV 3.7, an Athlon 1700+ w/ 512mb of RAM, and it had a PVR-500 and an AIW9600. I could record 3 shows at once without issues, and watch them as well, however I pleased.
Click to expand...

PVR-500 = Standard Def.
Can you try it with 3 HD tuners and playback in HD @ HD resolutions?
That would be cool if your little box can do that.
 
Your Athlon 1700 with radeon 9600 can NOT record 3 shows and playback at the same time in HD. Absolutely impossible. Check the threads and guides on every HTPC site on minimum recs for HD. The 9600 has no hardware acceleration for H.264 or VC-1 HD decoding and there's no way in hell the Athlon 1700 can handle that.

You were recording and playing back at SD.
 
JonDoms said:
PVR-500 = Standard Def.
Can you try it with 3 HD tuners and playback in HD @ HD resolutions?
That would be cool if your little box can do that.
Click to expand...

About a year ago, my Athlon 3000+ had 2x ATSC and the PVR-500 (with a 9800 Pro), which worked just fine playing back the OTA 720p signal to my 42" Samsung. The only difference I noticed going to an x2 3800+ is that showsqueeze and smart skip run faster. I've added an HDHomeRun since then, so you can see the specs in my sig below of its current state.

lawrence131 said:
Your Athlon 1700 with radeon 9600 can NOT record 3 shows and playback at the same time in HD. Absolutely impossible. Check the threads and guides on every HTPC site on minimum recs for HD. The 9600 has no hardware acceleration for H.264 or VC-1 HD decoding and there's no way in hell the Athlon 1700 can handle that.

You were recording and playing back at SD.
Click to expand...

That is correct. I was doing SD. I didn't differentiate as the OP posted about having difficulties with SD within BTV - if you check out his specs, he's running an AIW 2006 Edition, which is basically a AIW 9600 non-Pro, IIRC. Only a few differences between that card and the one I have extensive experience with BTV with (radio tuner, dual vga vs dvi, core clock speed, memory speed).

I never said I was doing HD, nor does BTV 3.7 support HD (or widescreen for that matter). You've got to goto 4.0 to get HD support. I also did NOT state that I was doing any H.264 or VC1 HD decoding.

Though, a few years back, a friend of mine did use a slightly faster Athlon XP to do HD playback in MCE without issue. But we're talking MPEG transport streams from OTA broadcasts, which are peanuts compared to the current high end stuff (but was awesome by the year 2005's standards)
 
Schro said:
About a year ago, my Athlon 3000+ had 2x ATSC and the PVR-500 (with a 9800 Pro), which worked just fine playing back the OTA 720p signal to my 42" Samsung. The only difference I noticed going to an x2 3800+ is that showsqueeze and smart skip run faster. I've added an HDHomeRun since then, so you can see the specs in my sig below of its current state.



That is correct. I was doing SD. I didn't differentiate as the OP posted about having difficulties with SD within BTV - if you check out his specs, he's running an AIW 2006 Edition, which is basically a AIW 9600 non-Pro, IIRC. Only a few differences between that card and the one I have extensive experience with BTV with (radio tuner, dual vga vs dvi, core clock speed, memory speed).

I never said I was doing HD, nor does BTV 3.7 support HD (or widescreen for that matter). You've got to goto 4.0 to get HD support. I also did NOT state that I was doing any H.264 or VC1 HD decoding.

Though, a few years back, a friend of mine did use a slightly faster Athlon XP to do HD playback in MCE without issue. But we're talking MPEG transport streams from OTA broadcasts, which are peanuts compared to the current high end stuff (but was awesome by the year 2005's standards)
Click to expand...

Yea I'm assuming he's going for H.264 and VC-1 1080p material since he just splurged on a beautiful 46" Sharp Aquos 1080p screen :)

I've recently been doing research on this topic so I'll be doing some amateur tests soon on many different platform combinations of CPU's and GPU's as well as using various codecs just for my own interest. Between the home and office I have about 20 PC's ranging from P3's and AthlonXP Bartons to Intel Quadcores and 8x00 series vidcards so it'll be interesting to see how they handle new HD material.

I played Troy (MKV file) in 720P H.264 on the Intel Quad (3.3ghz) with a 7800GTX this morning and CPU utilization is only about 12% and only on the FIRST core with almost 0% on the other 3 cores using FFDshow (I believe FFDshow is a pure software decoder and does not support GPU acceleration or multi-core CPU utilization). I also have CoreAVC professional which currently does not support GPU acceleration but does support multi-core CPU's so I'll test this as well, but at 720P with no GPU acceleration at all, the loads seem small enough that there will be no appreciable differences. I'm in the process of downloading some 1080p VC1 and H.264 samples to test out on my higher end machines to see if it stresses them much.

My impression so far is that the CPU is by and large the most important hardware factor. Relying on GPU offloading is too random depending on what software player/codec you are using (many have no support for GPU decoding at all), driver releases, etc. In addition, if my brief research is correct, to enable Nvidia PureVideo GPU decoding of your videos you actually have to BUY it (the codec is NOT included in the driver pack). It does not just magically happen in all your software titles, although some are adding specific GPU support like CoreAVC. If you invest in a powerful enough CPU (everything supports CPU decoding :) I don't think you can go wrong. Unfortunately for your current rig, Intel CPU's current encode/decode much better than the ones available to your platform. You also have to check with the software you intend to use (you will probably start venturing out beyond just Beyond TV soon), because some may not support multi-threading or GPU offloading so getting a dual-core at the same speed and architecture may not change much in some cases other than multi-tasking.

I will do some tests with pure software decoding/encoding using various CPU's only with no GPU involvement in 1080p H.264 and VC1 (less demanding formats are a moot point since anything will handle it, even 720p H.264 decoding only uses ~12% of one Intel core) and give you an update. I'll also swap in different video cards to see if it actually makes a difference depending on what software is being run - my impression is that GPU offloading is very software dependent, but I'm new to this whole HTPC world as well so may be completely wrong.
 
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