100% CPU usage with Beyond Media

[4110]

I have had BeyondMedia and BeyondTV for a couple of months. I found very early that I occasionally had jerky video when watching a recorded TV show. The video would freeze for a second then snap forward, play smoothly for a second then freeze again. The sound played smoothly throughout. I have learned more about it. At first I thought it was limited to the TV shows I recorded with BeyondTV. In the last few days I have found that it also happens with live TV in BeyondTV and with videos in BeyondMedia.

When it happens I have also noticed that the computer is extremely sluggish; almost non-responsive. Today when this was happening I opened Control Panel-Administrative Tools-Performance. The CPU usage was 100%. That explains the sluggish computer and probably the jerky video as well. I then opened Windows Task Manager. The only active applications were BeyondTV and BeyondMedia (except for Task Manager and Performance). I closed BeyondTV and BeyondMedia and was surprised to find that CPU usage was still 100%. I then clicked the Processes tab in Task Manager. Even with the applications closed there were still several BeyondTV, BeyondMedia and FireFly processes active. I started closing them and the first three I closed had no impact; CPU usage remained 100%. However, when I closed the SS Beyond Media.exe process the CPU usage immediately dropped from 100% to 0. I don't yet know if this is the only source of my problem nor why it only happens occasionally.

Has anyone else had BeyondMedia (or any of the other processes) run away like that? Is this a problem that the system engineers need to address or something faulty in my setup? If me, how do I prevent the errant process(es) from taking over my computer?

Thanks,

David

[fester]

I think you may want to post hardware specs, OS, BTV software version, DVD decoder (y'know nvdvd, powerdvd, etc... ) and anything else like BTV log's - in order for people or snapstream support to assist you

my take: I couldnt put up with than 5 minutes with more than 25%-35% CPU utilization since I've come to expect about 2-25%. If this is how btv has performed 100% of the time - then you may want to uninstall - clean registry and other files (I use regcleaner but you can also goto regedit if you're brave) then just retry everything w/ 3.5.3. Have you tried any older versions w/ better result?

When was the last time you reloaded the OS? seems like most people who have not defragged the HD or reloaded the OS on a freshly formatted HD have more issues.

defrag takes hours... reload OS takes 15-30 mins depending on hw. good luck

[slpmep]

Have clean XP based systems. one dedicated to BTV and BM. SYstem w/BTV+BM+Firefly routinely pin's itself...usually w/BM consuming full CPU.....

[nanook105]

Anything strange in the log file ? What default settings did you change ? What plugins are you using ?

[4110]

Hi all,

Thanks for your help. I didn't mean to leave you hanging but I am also working with official Snapstream help and they have diverted my attention. Still, since we haven’t solved it, this issue may be of interest to others, and most important, someone here may have the answer so I'll keep going and hope I don't offend Brett at Snapstream.

I did a little more testing since my first post. As I mentioned, the runaway process is SSBeyondMedia.exe. But it doesn't always run away. I found that if BeyondMedia Application is operating normally and I close it the SSBeyondMedia.exe Process also goes away. However, when it runs wild and the CPU usage is 100% then closing the BM Application does not stop the SSBeyondMedia Process.

SLPMEP, I am intrigued about your observation “w/BM consuming full CPU.....” That sounds like what I have. However, I don’t fully understand the rest of your post and how to set up to avoid it. Would you provide more detail for me? Thanks.

Nanook105, I have had the underlying jerky video since I started. I started with the default settings and have probably tried every combination so I don’t think it is settings. I have written before and even thought I solved the problem a time or two but it is intermittent and always comes back. What is new this time is the observation about the runaway process. I don’t know what a plugin is. How do I find out which ones if any?

Fester (and all) at the bottom of this post I have pasted some of my DxDiag file to provide some system information. My computer is new this year so there shouldn't be too much garbage in the registry.

Thanks,
David
------------------
System Information
------------------
Time of this report: 4/24/2005, 12:41:52
Machine name: MEDIA
Operating System: Windows XP Professional (5.1, Build 2600) Service Pack 2 (2600.xpsp_sp2_gdr.050301-1519)
Language: English (Regional Setting: English)
System Manufacturer: VIAK8T
System Model: AWRDACPI
BIOS: Phoenix - AwardBIOS v6.00PG
Processor: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3500+, MMX, 3DNow, ~2.2GHz
Memory: 1024MB RAM
Page File: 389MB used, 3606MB available
Windows Dir: C:\WINDOWS
DirectX Version: DirectX 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)
DX Setup Parameters: Not found
DxDiag Version: 5.03.2600.2180 32bit Unicode

---------------
Display Devices
---------------
Card name: NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200
Manufacturer: NVIDIA
Chip type: GeForce FX 5200
DAC type: Integrated RAMDAC
Device Key: Enum\PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0322&SUBSYS_00000000&REV_A1
Display Memory: 128.0 MB
Current Mode: 1024 x 768 (32 bit) (60Hz)
Monitor: Default Monitor

The C: drive is a 250gb. TV is recorded to a second drive.

[slpmep]

4110: Sorry....haven't figured out the solution yet...was simply stating what I believe is exactly the same situation as I have...my only difference is that I've experienced it on two different machine, with different hd's [ one=IDE and one=sata ] which two different capture cards [ one=PVR350 and the one=eHome Wonder ]

I find BM get's CPU bound frequently when I bounce in and out of BTV... I also have the same situation as you in that when I exit BM, it often hangs and one of it's processes is running wild....

[4110]

Slpmep,

I probably shouldn't say this but I was a little bit glad to hear that you were having the same problem. Not that I wanted problems for anybody else, but it was comforting to find that I wasn't the only one. I am still working with official Snapstream help. Since it is an intermittent problem it has taken a couple of days to have an event that I was able to capture to a log. But I got it today and sent it off. Let's keep our fingers crossed that the Snapstream engineers can use it to solve this.

David

[cd084]

I to have just started having this prob' as well, started about a week ago. I have been running BTV & BM for about four months now, NO Problems at all. This started one afternoon out of the blue.... 100% for SSBeyondMedia.exe.
My temp solution (I'm on the road allot, and the trouble & strife doesn’t like to miss her shows) was to just to run the btm lite that can with the firefly remote instead of the BM. But I do like my BM would like to get it going again without reinstalling it.
My system... P2.8, XP, 4x160gbata133, NVIDIA 5200, PVR350, 512mb. Windows Updates are turned off (last undated manually about 4weeks ago)

[4110]

I received a suggestion to change settings. Specifically, In Video settings change the MPEG2 Aspect Ratio. Since it is an intermittent problem so I can never be 100% sure if it is fixed but I am trying it now. If others try it too it will increase the sample size. Please let us know how it works.

David

[softnerd]

Hmm. I just started having this problem today. I've been using BM for about a month with no problems at all. Now BM starts to get slow within 10 minutes of opening it EVERY TIME I open it. Task Manager says it's using between 95% and 100% CPU until I eventually close it. I haven't changed any settings or started using any new plugins for 2 weeks. I'm in BM pretty much every night and this is the first I've seen of it. Not good.

HTPC system specs are as follows:

AMD Athlon XP 1700+
512MB Crucial RAM
Abit KR7A-RAID motherboard
Radeon 8500DV video, component out to TV
System Drive: 80GB Hitachi ATA-133
Media Drive: 200GB Seagate SATA
M-Audio Revolution 7.1
2 x Sapphire Theatrix 550 Pro Tuners
Broadcom-based PNA network adapter
Windows XP Home SP2
BeyondTV v3.5.3
BM v1.0
Like I said, this just started earlier this evening out of nowhere and is still there after several reboots...I've even tried removing all plugins and using default skin. Puzzling.

[4110]

Hi Softnerd,

I started the thread and still have the problem.

I was comparing specs between our systems. I also have an AMD chip and an abit board. Wonder if it could be something with the hardware that doesn't work with BM? I would welcome input from others on the forum, especially folks with AMD and abit.

Originally I noticed the problem with recorded TV using Beyond TV. At the time I thought BTV was the problem. It was only recently that I found the problem happened in BM with video, pictures or even nothing - just starting BM sometimes triggered the run-away process. Since I now suspect BM I have been using BTV as a stand alone application rather than starting it from BM. So far no problems, although with an intermittent problem you can never be 100% sure.

David

[softnerd]

Hi Softnerd,

I started the thread and still have the problem.

I was comparing specs between our systems. I also have an AMD chip and an abit board. Wonder if it could be something with the hardware that doesn't work with BM? I would welcome input from others on the forum, especially folks with AMD and abit.

Originally I noticed the problem with recorded TV using Beyond TV. At the time I thought BTV was the problem. It was only recently that I found the problem happened in BM with video, pictures or even nothing - just starting BM sometimes triggered the run-away process. Since I now suspect BM I have been using BTV as a stand alone application rather than starting it from BM. So far no problems, although with an intermittent problem you can never be 100% sure.

David

Nah. CPU type wouldn't matter...the chipset could, but not very likely. Something like this would either be a BM problem, BM Plug-in problem, or a driver problem (and thus, could relate to the chipset the motherboard uses). The Via K8T chipset in your system and the Via KT266A chipset in my HTPC are so different that there's no common ground there, Via chipset, ABIT board or not. I'm guessing it's a BM problem and I need to clean out a setup file, registry key, or something like that. It's definitely not a hardware problem unless we both have a bad capacitor or something that is making our systems unstable. 99.999999% chance it's a software problem one way or another.

At this point I'm suspicious of 2 things: the 'Recorded Shows' plugin (which I forgot to remove before), and the fact that this may have started for me after I had a BTV recording forcefully ended before its scheduled time, resulting in it having no end date/time stamp for the show. I was seeing the PVSLibraryAppService process eating a lot of CPU cycles after closing BM, and I don't have this problem when I run BTV by itself. I'm going to check these 2 things when I get home. If BM is written in C#, I could be looking at an exception handling problem. Could be stuck in some kind of a Try...Catch...retry loop that somehow isn't causing a stack overflow exception to be thrown. I'll get back to ya.

[Baylo]

Interesting - I just started having this problem last night, too, though too late for me to do anything other than try a couple of reboots which didn't solve the problem. The CPU meter jumps to 100% almost immediately and stays there. I also noticed the PVSLibraryAppService process working overtime as Softnerd notes.

BTV still works fine by itself.

I thought maybe my recent installation of Slimserver might have something to do with it, so I uninstalled it but it made no difference.

Other than that, I've made no changes to a system that has been running happily 24/7 for months.

Mark

[softnerd]

Interesting - I just started having this problem last night, too, though too late for me to do anything other than try a couple of reboots which didn't solve the problem. The CPU meter jumps to 100% almost immediately and stays there. I also noticed the PVSLibraryAppService process working overtime as Softnerd notes.

BTV still works fine by itself.

I thought maybe my recent installation of Slimserver might have something to do with it, so I uninstalled it but it made no difference.

Other than that, I've made no changes to a system that has been running happily 24/7 for months.

Mark

Hmm. That's interesting that you just started getting this too. Do you have the 'Recorded Shows' plug-in loaded? I'm wondering why this seems to tie in with the PVSLibraryAppService process. Once I run BM and close it that process cranks on the CPU until I close the BTV services. I can then re-start the BTV services and it's fine until the next time I run BM, at which time BM starts to seize up within 1-2 minutes and PVSLibraryAppService starts whaling on the CPU again. I deleted my suspect recordings, so that's not causing it. It's starting to annoy me now 'cause we use BM for music almost every day. Grr. I'll look into this more tonight and see what I can find out...

[memphis]

Just an FYI,

I have had BM installled for several months and all of sudden today on 2 different machines the BM exe started to consume 100% of the CPU even after a reboot.

On both of these machines I had installed the showtime plugin that allows you to view the showtimes from the local theathers. I removed the plugin restarted BM and all was fine. This worked for both machines.

I am guessing that the server that this plugin uses to pull its data from was hosed up thus causing the high CPU.

Not sure if anyone else has this plugin but I found it odd that so many people were having a similar issue.

[frekin]

I have confirmed the fix mentioned by memphis. I was actually watching an avi file in BM on Monday when the problem started with no warning. I haven't updated the Movie Showtimes plugin for a while. I'm going to check if the most recent version exhibits the same cpu usage problem.

[Kilrsat]

If it is showtimes, and someone wants to provide me with a Country/Location + version combination that exhibits the problem I'll be glad to fix it as soon as I can.

However, I just did another one of my tests with the current version (1.4.3) using 5 US zip codes and everything was fine and dandy. I'll be double checking the other countries here shortly. I've had the current version running 24/7 since April 18th without issue, at least for my zip code.

My first recommendation will be to use the current version if you aren't, and failing that, move to one of the zip codes that I know works :winkwink:

[frekin]

As I mentioned a few posts earlier, I uninstalled my old version of the showtimes plug-in and the CPU usage problem went away. Unfortunately, I didn't note which old version I had been using.

I just installed the latest version of the showtimes plug-in, and everything is working fine again. Can anyone else with the 100% CPU issue tell us which version of the plug-in they are using?

[mockware]

got hit with this today for the first time. I don't have the showtime plugin installed. Got an error in BTV about a recorded show being corrupted and so went to view a different recorded show and it hit the 100% spike. The show it complained about plays on another machine without a problem.

[softnerd]

As I mentioned a few posts earlier, I uninstalled my old version of the showtimes plug-in and the CPU usage problem went away. Unfortunately, I didn't note which old version I had been using.

I just installed the latest version of the showtimes plug-in, and everything is working fine again. Can anyone else with the 100% CPU issue tell us which version of the plug-in they are using?

That appears to have been the sticky wicket for me as well. I guess I didn't give it enough time when I tried removing the plugins before. By the way, the version of the Movie Showtimes plugin that was causing the problem for me was v1.4.1.39403. I removed that one and installed v1.4.3 and all seems to be well again.

[Baylo]

Hmm. That's interesting that you just started getting this too. Do you have the 'Recorded Shows' plug-in loaded? I'm wondering why this seems to tie in with the PVSLibraryAppService process. Once I run BM and close it that process cranks on the CPU until I close the BTV services. I can then re-start the BTV services and it's fine until the next time I run BM, at which time BM starts to seize up within 1-2 minutes and PVSLibraryAppService starts whaling on the CPU again. I deleted my suspect recordings, so that's not causing it. It's starting to annoy me now 'cause we use BM for music almost every day. Grr. I'll look into this more tonight and see what I can find out...

Sorry for going silent over the last couple of days... been busy, busy, busy...

I know I'm running an old version of the Movie Showtimes plugin - it had been working fine so I hadn't bothered updating. I'll try removing it / updating as suggested above and see what happens.

Cheers,

Mark

[mobile_bob]

Hmm it seems like a lot of people were able to fix there problems by updateing movie showtimes... The sad thing is this is starting to happen to me and I do not have Movie Showtimes plugin... It used to only happen when I tried to view certain Divx shows (Happened every time...) But now seems to be happening at random...

Mobile_Bob

[pwwoj]

I've removed MovieShowtimes and it helped for 2 days and everything started again. I noticed that after two days of running, SSBeyondMedia process got over 200MB of memory. Also what is interesting and might be a clue McAfee goes crazy and shares 100% of cpu with BM. After killing BM process McAfee stops consuming CPU.

Peter

AMD Sempron, epox mini me (ep-8rgf with nVidia nForce2 + GeForce4MX), PVR500, WinXPSP2, BM, BTV

[bnflaherty]

do you have the snapstream folders excluded from scanning?

[mobile_bob]

I can't belive people are just now getting into the mix of this problem... I posted this problem a year ago and also turned in bug reports about it and never heard back... I can get BM to go 100% CPU on command... I have several DIVX files and MPG files that whenever I try to watch them they run really slow and BM hits 100% and stayes that way untill I Three Key and Kill The prosses (No closing BM does not fix the problem). I have been waiting for some kind of fix but I don't think BM is of any consern while they work on BTV... Sorry if this sounds a little angry but it's just frusterating that there hasn't been so much as a beta to fix problems people have been having since day one of BM...

PS. Yes the files in question run fine in WMP and any other Player I try them in...

Mobile_Bob

[Anry_74]

Hi all!

I think I found a solution for this problem.

It's likely a big corrupt movie file that is causing the problem.
BM is indexing the files when you enter video mode and get stucked on the bad file.
Actually explorer is doing the same thing. If I entered the folder with the bad movie in explorer, explorer went into the 100% usage problem and had to be force stopped.
Solution:
Move all avi, divx and mpg files out of the folders that BM uses for video.
Move them back in one at the time to see when the problem returns.
Trash that file.

This helped me! :banana:
Good luck!

[mobile_bob]

Hi all!

I think I found a solution for this problem.

It's likely a big corrupt movie file that is causing the problem.
BM is indexing the files when you enter video mode and get stucked on the bad file.
Actually explorer is doing the same thing. If I entered the folder with the bad movie in explorer, explorer went into the 100% usage problem and had to be force stopped.
Solution:
Move all avi, divx and mpg files out of the folders that BM uses for video.
Move them back in one at the time to see when the problem returns.
Trash that file.

This helped me! :banana:
Good luck!

I agree this has been a problem for me... But it doesn't solve the problem if you hit 100% when you run specific files... All other players play these files fine...

Mobile_Bob

[RiderFan]

I have this problem as well, but my CPU is at 0%...not 100% as others posted.

When I close out of BM, 50% of the time, the process is still showing up in the task manager. I watched it for a few minutes, and sometimes the process will go away after a few minutes, sometimes not.

Well, BM was a total ripoff anyway, except for the DVD Library plugin I would have rid myself of the useless program a long long time ago. Well, at least they continue to bring out update for BTV, but it seems they have left BM users out in the cold. Their thinking is probably that we are going to integrate BM and BTV together sometime in the next decade, so we will just let the people who supported us by purchasing BM in good faith twist in the wind untill we are good and ready to throw them a bone.

[visque]

I also have this issue... Even when the program is resident but "idle". No alterations have been made to the system and it had been running correctly, and efficiently, for months. I will be watching for a difinitive answer.

XP Pro, SP3 build 2600, HP pavilion 3GBMhz,2.5Gb Ram, Beyond TV 4.9.2