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[Z0001]

Just noticed this on most recent stable build. No recent pc changes. The mkv skips, very short skips, tends to build after a while of play. Done the obvious such as turning pc off and on again. No change. Only have MS security essentials, no other AV.

My external HDD is very full, maybe only 80GB of a 2TB left. could this be a problem? ESATA connection.

It's a powerful pc, and no problem usually running ROHQ.

Any wise thoughts?
Z

[JimH]

Please try 19.0.103, available at the top of this board.

[glynor]

My external HDD is very full, maybe only 80GB of a 2TB left. could this be a problem? ESATA connection.

Yes.  Hard drive performance takes a nosedive on the inner tracks, and fragmentation issues become exponentially worse as free space decreases.

Try running a manual defrag on the disk (which, with 80GB of 2048GB available might take a while).  See if it improves.

[Z0001]

Frag analysis looks good, 0% fragged.

Updated Radeon video drivers, seems to have helped, jumpy less often. So could this just be a symptom of a very full 2TB HDD?

Not yet updated to latest MC, still on stable.

Thanks for your helps.
Z

[CountryBumkin]

Run Windows resource monitor (cntrl+Alt+Del) task manager >performance> resource monitor then click on box next to JRiver "media center" (or whatever the actual name is), then watch the resources as you play a BD. Keep an eye on the Disk resources. On my system I found that my SSD drive was filling up with "Temp" files during playback then it would cause stuttering and sometimes crash MC when it reached 99% full. The problem was hard to find for me because the Temp files would be automatically deleted when playback stopped leaving no evidence. I ended up moving MC's Temp file location to a different drive to solve the problem. MC was installed on my 60GB SSD drive (along with Win7 OS) and my movies where on separate RAID drives. The issue did not appear until the SSD drive became more full with programs and such over time.

[BenKenobi]

For what it is worth if you ripped the Blu Ray into any frame rate other than the original stream the jumping may be built in, plus if your screen display frequency doesn't match the framerate you will see the same thing.

Drive fragmentation has a huge affect too but more so the older and slower the drive is, you could try increasing the prebuffering duration to compensate.

I've also removed all non essentials from or HTPC so no antvirus, search indexing or any other non essential services and applications but it depends on your set up what is 'essential'

[Z0001]

Ok

So updated video drivers. No improvement.

Updated to latest MC build. No improvement.

Then looked at CPU usage while playing blu mkv, it's pretty constant 100%.

Running ROHQ, my JRMark is 1047 from an intel i7 870 2.93GHz with 4GB RAM, Radeon HD6870 Hawk (which is GDDR5! 930MHz, 1GB), W7 SP1, x64. Is this powerful enough? If not, any upgrade ideas?

I've not had problems on this machine running ROHQ before. Switched to ROStd and CPU at 30-40% and no jumps. Not seeing any temp files or disk usage, all conversion cache being written to C which has 57GB free.

Could this be due to full media disks slowing things down? I access them via an eSATA controller card connected to a port multiplier on my storage box that holds 5x 2TB HDD. The movie we were watching was on a disk that had 209GB of the 1.8TB free, so not too full I would have thought.

So we then switched to watching the iso of the movie on TMT6. No problems. Smooth as can be.

Any super bright ideas where this problem is coming from? Seems odd that this is a new problem.
Cheers
Z

[Hendrik]

It appears there is an issue right now that results in no hardware accelerated decoding being used on AMD cards when using RO HQ, and your CPU is too weak to play it.
In a future build, hardware accelerated decoding will be used (as long as you have it enabled in the Video options), even when using RO HQ on AMD cards.

The new build will be posted soon, please be patient for a few more days.

[Z0001]

Hendrik, that's wonderful news. Thank you.

[glynor]

I have pretty much exactly that same system in my HTPC.  I have more RAM and an SSD, but the Core i7 870 and 6870 works fine typically.

I haven't noticed any issues with it lately, but I'm sure Hendrik is right.

[Hendrik]

JRMark of 1047 seemed pretty low for that system, maybe something else is going on.
But in default RO HQ mode, with an AMD GPU you wouldn't get hardware acceleration right now (unless I missed something somewhere, but it seemed pretty straightforward)

[glynor]

JRMark of 1047 seemed pretty low for that system, maybe something else is going on.

I thought so too, though I haven't tested mine recently.

[glynor]

Yeah.  Something's wrong.

First off, I was wrong about my build.  I forgot, the i7 870 is in a different box.  I replaced the old Core i5 750 with a Core i5 760.  So, here's the specs for my HTPC:

* Intel Core i5 760 (Nehalem)
* 8GB RAM
* AMD Radeon HD 6870 (an ASUS model that is slightly overclocked, but not by much)
* a nice SSD
* not too much else that's relevant.

Here's what I get for a JRMark:

Code: [Select]

=== Running Benchmarks (please do not interrupt) ===

Running 'Math' benchmark...
    Single-threaded integer math... 4.096 seconds
    Single-threaded floating point math... 2.299 seconds
    Multi-threaded integer math... 2.333 seconds
    Multi-threaded mixed math... 1.299 seconds
Score: 1895

Running 'Image' benchmark...
    Image creation / destruction... 0.586 seconds
    Flood filling... 0.590 seconds
    Direct copying... 0.818 seconds
    Small renders... 1.652 seconds
    Bilinear rendering... 1.153 seconds
    Bicubic rendering... 0.913 seconds
Score: 3851

Running 'Database' benchmark...
    Create database... 0.302 seconds
    Populate database... 1.531 seconds
    Save database... 0.340 seconds
    Reload database... 0.052 seconds
    Search database... 1.286 seconds
    Sort database... 1.415 seconds
    Group database... 0.880 seconds
Score: 3703
JRMark (version 19.0.107): 3150

I'll attach a copy of this along with the output from the Reporter function in MC.  If your Core i7 870 is really getting that score, something is badly borked.  Red October HQ works fine on it, with a wide variety of video formats and types, including BluRay.

I don't care much about an occasional dropped frame, and switch madVR to windowed mode to avoid the annoying blink when switching modes, but I don't have any serious problems.  Quality is good.

[Z0001]

I thought it seemed low. Also I have a 120GB PCIe Revo drive as my boot drive.

I'm not sure how I would go about trouble shooting something like this. Any advice on how I should approach the problem?

Many thanks guys for your thoughts and help
Z

[glynor]

Post a copy of the Benchmark output.  It should match mine from above fairly closely.

If it doesn't, perhaps we'll see where it is getting a low rating.  You could also post a copy of the output from the Reporter.
1. In the tree, go to: Services & Plugins > Reporter
2. Click the Copy to Clipboard button.
3. Open Notepad and paste it into a TXT file.
4. Save the text file.
5. Attach it to your post.

(You can't post the output from Reporter directly on the forum, as it is usually too big.)

[Z0001]

I'll send a copy of the reports. Interesting to note that in idle the CPU was at 81C which seems very hot.

[Hendrik]

It would make sense that your PC throttles the CPU performance because it overheats, you should probably check the CPU cooler if its still seated properly on the CPU and the fan is still operational (or get someone to check that if you don't have the expertise to rummage around in your PC)

[glynor]

I'll send a copy of he reports. Interesting to note that in idle the CPU was at 81C which seems very hot.

Way, WAY too hot for idle.  Even with the stock heatsink/fan combo, it should be running around 60C (with a good HSF, you could see low 50s or even mid-40s at idle).

That explains the low JRMark.  It is throttled.  Something is borked in the cooling on that, or the CPU is blown.  My guess?  The fan stopped spinning.

[Hendrik]

Way, WAY too hot for idle.  Even with the stock heatsink/fan combo, it should be running around 60C (with a good HSF, you could see low 50s or even mid-40s at idle).

mid 40s in idle? You need better "good" HSFs :p
I typically run <30C in idle, with a cooling target of around ~70C at 100% (which doesn't happen during normal use really)

[glynor]

Yeah, yeah.  Mine both do idle in the 30s.  I was being conservative because definitions of "good" vary, and I live in the cold.

Mine are Noctuas.  

[Z0001]

It all feels too hot for sure. Dust out this weekend! Interesting when I enter theatre view I can hear the fan increase speed and the temp steps to 83C. It s in theatre view all day. I did try to set power options to allow sleep after  some time but this was giving me so many failed awakenings where i would have to power off that I gave up.

Thanks guys
Z

[Ninouchka]

Hi,

check that the airflow in your pc case is constant.
If something blocks it, dirty fans, no proper cable managment, cat in front of pc 
clean it. I have an I7 930, a big Antec case, a big cpu cooler Nehalem, all 4 fans (Nexus 120 mm)
run at 800 rpm. Very good airflow, cpu temp doesn't go over 55 degrees C at 100 percent usage.
Just a good constant airflow does the trick, it can be a low and quiet one.
Also keep in mind that windows 7 does run a small defrag in the background, a very well hidden background task,
just google for it how to disable this. Your free space on the HDD ain't enough for this.

Another tip to defrag faster, is to attach preferably internally, an empty drive. Move your files to this drive,
this makes you external one empty.. no frag at all, and move your files back to the external.
The move operation is a lot faster than windows defragmentation, and the end result is even beter.

Also keep in mind that e-sata for the moment only supports SATA2, not SATA3 yet. I guess the new e-sata cables
for SATA3 will be out on the market in 1, maybe 2 months. You can Always build your external one, inside your case.

I hope this helps a bit.

[Z0001]

Hmmm. Opened it up and found the mounting frame for the CPU cooler had a crack through it and the CPU cooler was therefore not in contact with the CPU.

There's me answer, no thermal management!

Thanks folks
Z