WTV Stutter on HTPC

[stuppid]

I also chose dvr-ms because to my knowledge there are not any devices besides xbox that will handle wtv yet. I did not want to have to re-encode later if I ever decided to make a platform change if media center dies.

[carljanderson]

the issue I have with videoredo is the lack of VC-1. My trial ends in 2 days, so I am going to have to decide soon if $100 is worth it just for DVD's. I don't know what other features I would be using other than WTV of mpeg 2 and h264 if I come across more DVDs. I am going step by step,,, liveTV TV, DVD, and now Bluray.

Looks like I need to figure out handbrake and dvrmtoolbox for my blu rays.

[carljanderson]

My systems and the DVRMSToolbox WTV's just don't get along. I am trying to get some space savings with the BD. With MEncode, the file size was 10G vs. 30G for the original MKV. However, the resulting WTV from todvrms showed the same stuttering as before.

I am now onto Handbrake 0.9.6 to see what I can manage there. However, I may have to jump to a South Park Episode, since Handbrake is taking almost 21 hours for a 20GB movie (5 year old AMD Athlon 64x2 5600+, 4GB DDR2). I don't want to try a setting then wait a day to see what the result is. I should have thought of that before, but oh well.

[miles267]

Carl, over the past couple weeks I have been focused on identifying the cause of my MKV to WTV stutter issue on my HTPC. Keep in mind I have one of the newer AMD A8-3850 APUs (with integrated ATI 6550D HD video cards on the CPU). Am using with an ASUS F1A75-M PRO motherboard. Not totally certain whether the motherboard is relevant but I thought I would mention.

Ultimately, after swapping catalyst video drivers (am currently running latest 12.1) and different iterations of DVRMSToolbox (finally settled on latest 1.2.2.5) and Haali media splitter, I believe I have identified the issue. Turns out, I had my SATA mode set to AHCI in my ASUS BIOS, which seems to be the culprit. Windows 7 ran without issue, no BSODs or performance issues. However, even if there were, they wouldn't have been noticable to the eye until they cropped up in time sensitive data like video with audio/video. At any rate, changing SATA mode in my BIOS from AHCI to IDE seems to have fixed the issue.

That said, it was necessary for me to re-convert files from MKV to WTV with DVRMSToolbox (todvrms.exe) after the BIOS change was made. As once the stutter occurred using my HDD in AHCI mode, it remained in the WTV output file until I deleted the WTV, changed from AHCI to IDE and reprocessed the same MKV to WTV using DVRMSToolbox 1.2.2.5's Convert MkV to WTV profile. The output was then a smooth WTV file as hoped.

I should also mention that while in AHCI mode, I did try your VideoRedo method to convert MKV to WTV and it resulted in a smooth WTV file, but my objective was to get DVRMSToolbox to work as I want the benefits of the metadata lookup from thetvdb.com and integrated XML that properly indexes shows in Windows 7 Media Center until Recorded TV.

Please confirm your BIOS settings and try this and tell me if it helps you. I seem to recall having to do it on my previous Gigabyte motherboard as well but it had been so long that I failed to remember this step when I built my new HTPC on ASUS board.

Good luck!

[carljanderson]

IDE instead of AHCI? I will have to try that. I am pretty sure all 3 of the machines that I could use are all set AHCI.

Never in a million years would I have thought of that. I will give it a try next week.

[miles267]

Carl, have you had an opportunity to try this? FWIW, it appears to have resolved all of my MKV to WTV stutter issues using todvrms.exe with DVRMSToolbox. However in the past I also had issues with AMD's Cool n Quiet CPU throttling feature in the BIOS so I too would recommend disabling that if you're on an AMD-based platform. Also, it is possible that my newer ASUS F1A75-M PRO motherboard and AMD A8-3850 APU are so new that the ASUS AHCI drivers still need refinement. Regardless I've changed SATA from AHCI to IDE as I don't require NCQ or hot-swap capability for my HTPC. I've not seen any noticeable performance degradation either.

[carljanderson]

Miles,

Not yet. I was in Louisville, KY this past weekend and just haven't had the time since i have returned. However, there appears to be rain in the forecast all weekend in Southern California so no golf. Does mean I can use one of the computers for a MKV to WTV with TODVRMS test using IDE instead of AHCI.

Carl

[carljanderson]

seems to be the reason. Wall-E and Kung Fu Panda seemed to convert from MKV to WTV w/o issue. Haven't watched them in their entirety yet, but in the others the skipping occured every couple of minutes.

Also, AHCI to IDE isn't all that simple. Therefore only 1 machine is IDE. Looks like all MKV to WTV conversions will occur on the computer in the back until such time I have to rebuild the HTPC.

[miles267]

seems to be the reason. Wall-E and Kung Fu Panda seemed to convert from MKV to WTV w/o issue. Haven't watched them in their entirety yet, but in the others the skipping occured every couple of minutes.

Also, AHCI to IDE isn't all that simple. Therefore only 1 machine is IDE. Looks like all MKV to WTV conversions will occur on the computer in the back until such time I have to rebuild the HTPC.

So converting on the PC set to IDE worked, correct? Once I changed my BIOS to IDE even after the AHCI install and booted into Win 7 there was no further config needed. There's a specific registry entry that will adjust automatically when switched from AHCI to IDE but must be manually changed when switching from IDE to AHCI else you get BSOD.

[barnabas1969]

Miles, what made you decide to try IDE? I'm not sure how that would affect encoding a video file.

Anyway... switching from AHCI to IDE or vice-versa isn't so tough. Check out the following two links:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976
http://www.vistax64.com/general-discuss ... howto.html

[miles267]

barnabus1969, honestly cannot recall what prompted me to change the SATA mode on my HDD, but I recall doing it on my previous HTPC when I encountered the same issue and it addressed the issue. Not to mention, there was no noticable I/O or performance on the HDD after going to IDE so I didn't feel the need to pursue further. Besides, AHCI is also largely for hot swappable drives (aside from NCQ) and I didn't need that capability either. In addition, I found that it was necessary on any AMD system to disable the BIOS option called Cool n Quiet (older motherboards) which has since been renamed in mobos to AMD Power Now.

[carljanderson]

it did seem to help. There were no issue with the AVC encoded movies going from MKV to WTV.

Now the issue is with VC-1 encoded, and I may just quit and go X264 MKV's and wait for the Echo for the bedroom. Let that Core i5 in the backroom just churn and churn.