choppy video playback

wolfric

Right i had a spare computer lying around that i turned into a media computer. Using boxee and noticed that 720 and 1080 videos lagged. When you play it, every 1 to a few seconds you'd get an extremely quick lag spike but enough to bother the family enough to go back to sky.

it's like the film just goes a bit too fast for a brief second and jitters. I thought it was boxee at the start but when i tried vlc it was more or less the same.

It's pretty much bare bones and I've tested it without torrents running with same results (and even then i have them downloading on a separate drive before dumping onto external). Cpu and ram are fairly low i'd say below 25%.

I don't have any antivirus and just have the windows firewall so no scans slowing down hard drive. Videos are playing off an external hard drive (i had a look at http://www.assimilateinc.com/tools1.html but it requires unpartitioned drive). fairly new usb 2.0. Set power levels to full performance.


I have some ideas but these may or may not be valid and i could use some suggestions on proving them. Any other ideas are really appreciated.

*Bad codecs (or just inefficient ones).
*Buffer not big enough (not even going to guess how i would fix that, boxee doesn't have an option built in)
*I want to benchtest the hard drive (any suggestions). I'm probably going to leave it as external for now.
*Page file (2 gigs currently)? (not sure about this one)

Any ideas feel free to shout out.

docmol

I would suspect the external drive. Have you tried playing from the internal one?

bonzodog2

If you had the paging file on a separate (EDIT:secondary internal) hard drive that might help too.

+1 for play from internal drive

wolfric

Right the biggest file i have at the moment is a 11 gig 1080 which is 2h40m which is 160m
11,000 megs / 160min = 68 MB per min which is roughly 1.14 MB per second.

I'm copying it over now and it's roughly 30 MB/second but sure i'll see once it's done
Thanks

edit: page file is on internal. I play off external

bonzodog2

Do you perhaps have USB 1.0 ports on this PC ?

wolfric

nope.
Just a quick update. I turned off as much as i could and flidding around a small bit with boxee and now boxee seems to play it fine but vlc still plays it a bit choppy. When it gets bad video kind of sticks/jitters/jumps and doesn't display right as shown in screen shots below. VLC seems to have it happen more often but boxee still does it too if it's very bad.


http://img19.imageshack.us/i/vlcsnap2010062618h40m30.png/
http://img413.imageshack.us/i/vlcsnap2010062618h40m25.png/
http://img571.imageshack.us/i/vlcsnap2010062618h40m21.png/

Don't know if it helps but the first part of the movie runs fine (about 5-10 seconds) and then if there are problems it starts going from there so to me it seems like the buffer isn't big enough or something like that.

Boxees debug shows 900 megs free of memory running around 16/17 fps (but it doesn't seem to always be smooth i'm trying to test out the specifics to see what made the difference)

Google seems to suggest vlc doesn't have an fps output unfortunately. I've set vlc up to stream bigger chunks at a time and it seems to go fine for longer (from 10 seconds to about 40) but it still ends up wonking up like the above screenshots

RolandIRL

Try the K-Lite Mega Codec Pack.

another player and codecs to try out and report back

wolfric

already installed but will update and see thanks