HDTV stutters while in Beyond TV

[email_chad]

Hi I've been lurking for a little over a month now, and finally decided to go ahead and turn my old computer into a HTPC. Here are my specs:

Asus P4PE
2.4GHz P4 OC to 2.6GHz
1GB of RAM
BFG 6800 GS OC with all 16 pipes unlocked
2 PATA Seagate 400GB HD with 16MB buffers
Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Platinum
ATI HDTV Wonder
Hauppauge WinTV PVR 500MCE
Beyond TV 4
Beyond Media

My problem is when I am watching HD in BTV it stutters, but if I watch HD through the ATI DTV interface the picture is great. The stuttering is not really bad, it is about a stutter for about a sec or two every minute or so. What could cause this stuttering?

My signal is from OTA through an antenna in my attic. The only programs running is my anti-virus and firewall. I have went as far as to shut them down while watching HD to see if that fixes the problem with no luck.

I have yet to try SDTV through my wintv 500. I haven't hooked it up to an antenna yet. Any thoughts or suggestions would be greatly apprecitated.

Thanks again,
Chad

[cstorer]

Do you notice any difference in this stutter between 720 HD and 1080 HD?

I've had a problem that I just fixed last night, where 720 was *perfect*, but I was getting occasional stutters and what appeared to be dropped frames w/ 1080 content.

I also was able to play the 1080 content perfectly with apps other than BTV (WMP, VLC, MediaPortal).

Here are the two steps I took, and I now have *perfect* playback of 1080 content as well:

-Make sure you're using a dedicated partition for your recordings, and make sure it's formatted w/ 64k blocksize (Which is not an option if you're using the GUI format utility, do it from the commandline and use the /a:64k switch).

-Check your nvidia driver version. I've used the last 3 or so releases, all with jittery 1080 playback. On suggestion from other posts in this forum, I dropped back to 84.21.

I'm not sure the 64k blocksize on my recording partition made all that much difference, but I've seen it recommended in multiple places. The 84.21 nvidia driver is what did it, I think.

Hope that's helpful, I know how frustrating the stuttering can get

[email_chad]

Thanks for the suggestions cstorer.

My 'stuttering' seems to only while watching live tv through the BTV interface. I recorded some shows last night, with the BTV minimized in the sys tray. After it was done recording I watched them and there was minimal stuttering. Maybe twice in 30 minutes that I watched. That was in 1080(I think) I will verify later.

I am currently doing your 64k cluster suggestion, so I will see how that goes. Reading some of the other posts here looks like it should help me out by doing that.

I checked my driver and I am using the 8.4.2.1 driver.

One of the things I noticed last night was, I opened up the task mgr so I could see my CPU usage. Then I tried to watch live tv through the BTV. I noticed that my CPU was running around the 65-75% range. Is that about where it should be?

Is the ATI HD wonder card a hardware encoder? If not maybe that is my problem, since my CPU will take on all the encoding. Maybe? Well I just bought a better CPU fan and will try to OC my proc to a 2.8, and see if that helps.

Well thanks again and I will keep you posted on my findings.
Chad

[enigma9o7]

HD comes already "encoded", it's already digital, so no need to encode it, so that's not an issue. No such thing as software/hardware encoding for HD.