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[superchunk57]

little help here...

i recently discovered that the track position slider and and the elapsed time indicator will just stop in the middle of music playback, while the music itself continues normally.  i also found that the responce time for things like bringing up the media properties window or the options window are incredibly slow (i have waited several minutes, in some cases, while MJ is "Gathering File Information").  Task Manager says that the application is "Running", but the CPU usage is up at 50-60%, and that is with dual 1GHz processors.  i figured it must be the visualizations that were causeing it, even though the visualizations are not choppy or slow.  and so, switching to a screen other then the "Playing Now" screen or turning visualizations off solved the performance problem.  

normally i would have just said i need a new video card, but the wierd thing is that this has only been a problem in the last three days.  before that i was running visualizations at highest quality with it covering about 1/4 my screen.  it never stopped the track position slider before...

since this started, i've uninstalled and reinstalled MJ, i've upgraded to the latest version (8.0.399), installed new video drivers, and new Via 4in1 motherboard drivers.  none of this made any difference.  then i played around with the visualization studio, lowered the frame rate and switched to DirectX, there was only a slight improvement, the track position slider would move, but only once ever 10-20 seconds.  

this is not the kind of performance i am used to.  there must have been something that i did within the last couple of days to cause this ... do you have any ideas???



Media Jukebox PLUS 8.0.399
Install Path: C:\Program Files\J River\Media Jukebox\

CPU: Intel Pentium III 998 MHz MMX
Memory: Total - 523 MB, Free - 371 MB
OS: Microsoft Windows 2000  Workstation 5.0 Service Pack 3 (Build 2195)

Internet Explorer: 6.0.2600.0000
ComCtl32.dll: 5.50.4704.1100
Shlwapi.dll: 6.00.2600.0000
Shell32.dll: 5.00.3502.5436
wnaspi32.dll: Internal ASPI Layer

Thanks
b
 

[JimH]

Try a search on google for "Via chipset" problems.  You may find something similar.  We know of a problem with music and Via chips.  You could search here for posts from others on that.

Why it would happen all of a sudden is puzzling (if that's it).

I think there's a way to adjust the bios for "latency" on the PCI bus.

[superchunk57]

the google search turned up some suggestions for setting the PCI latency to 0, mine was at 32 previously.  that didn't help, so i put it back to 32, but i'm not sure if there is a better setting to try???  i also downloaded the PCI Latency Patch for Via Chipsets from

http://www.georgebreese.com/net/software/

no help there either....  from what i have read from these websites, their solutions are to solve problems with sound quality issues.  but for all i can tell, music playback is about the only thing that hasn't been affected.  and i'm not having any trouble in any other music player.

that was a good suggestion though, do you have any more to try???

thanks
b

[JimH]

Look carefully at all other tasks that are running.  Alt-Ctrl-Del.  Start killing anything you can identify.

Google on similar symptoms might also help.

[superchunk57]

well there aren't any tasks running now that were not running when it was working fine 4 days ago.  but i got rid of as many tasks as i could, one at a time, and still no luck.  i've been on google pretty much all day, so that's why i'm asking you guys...

i did find a tread listed here once about CD-RW drives causeing problems, MJ having a long response time when trying to access the drive.  it caught my interest because i was burning CD's around the same time i noticed the slow performance.  but i don't have any idea what to do about it, if it was the problem...

i also remember emptying my TEMP folder and doing some other cleanup type stuff around that time, would anything like that cause this problem???

any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
thanks
b

[superchunk57]

well folks i am still struggleing with this problem, i never would have guessed this would be such a stumper...

anyway, one other observation i've had, and that seems very interesting to me is that both music playback and the visualization performance has been almost completly unaffected.  when i run the "Are we there yet" visualization at normal quality, covering 1/4 of my screen, frame rates are normal (22.5fps).  but the position slider and elapsed time stops and opening the media file properties or Settings > Options takes several minutes (usually the length of the current playing song).  

my opinion is that if this were a true video performance issue the first thing that would go wrong is the visualizations would become choppy with low fps.  but it also can not be completly unrelated to video, because as soon as i turn visualizations off, the problem goes away...

i don't know if that helps, but this problem is really bugging me and i would really appreciate any ideas anyone has.

thanks
b

[Matt]

Visualizations run at a low priority so they shouldn't slow other things in the system down.

That makes me think the freeze happens when we ask the video card to paint.  Look at the IRQ table to see if too many things are sharing one IRQ or something.

Also, make sure your hard drives are in UDMA mode (Windows likes to change this) or else evertime MC reads from the disk everything will freeze for a while.

Finally, it may be worth trying Media Center 9.1 to see if the problem still exists.

Thanks and let us know.

[superchunk57]

ok, i'm pretty sure it can't be a UDMA issue cuz my hard drives are on an IDE RAID array, so i took a look at my IRQ's.  my video card is sharing IRQ 16 (Win2k...) with my network card, but that's it.  now i'm not too sure where to go from here.  changing IRQ's in Win2k is kind of a pain in the ass, should i try uninstalling my network card and pulling it out, then reboot and see if that helps???  I did disable the network card from the properties window, but there was no change within MJ.  is there anything else i can try???  

i'm not really ready to move to media center 9 yet cuz i was perfectly happy with MJ just less then a week ago...

minor issues like this, that come out of the blue, don't deserve to be left unsolved.  it goes against my priinciples...

thanks again,
b

[superchunk57]

hey guys, i appreciate all the suggestions so far, but please keep them coming...  i am totally frustrated with this problem with your software...

i changed some things around so that there are no other devices shareing IRQ's with my video card.  and when that did not help, i went ahead and upgraded to Media Center 9.  there was absolutely no change!  

i really need someone to help me take a closer look at this problem, is there any other information that i can give that would be helpful???  i am almost certain this has something to do with the video card painting issue, but keep in mind that only media jukebox/center have experienced problems...

hope to hear from you soon...
b