Jittery/stuttering menus, live TV, and recorded TV in WMC

[Satch]

Hi,

I recently built a new HTPC using Windows 7 and WMC. Everything was working fine at first then all of a sudden the WMC menus started to get jittery when scrolling through them. Further to this, live TV and recorded TV is also stutters, pixelates, and audio gets out of sync almost immediately. All other video outside of WMC plays fine so it is restricted to WMC it seems.

I am using onboard graphics (Intel 4600) with the latest drivers. I do not have any codec packs installed.

Has anyone come across this before? Uninstalling and reinstalling the WMC component does not fix the issue. Neither does resetting the WMC database. Please help!

[Scallica]

I would start by checking the health of your hard drives using HD Sentinel. http://www.hdsentinel.com/

Also, we need more information. What tuner are you using? Is the tuner on the latest firmware? Have you tried using a PCIe video card as a test?

[DSperber]

I am using onboard graphics (Intel 4600) with the latest drivers. I do not have any codec packs installed.

This is almost certainly your problem... insufficiently strong video capability. HDTV (especially 1080i) takes significantly more graphics horsepower to render smoothly on the local monitor than you might imagine. 720p requires less horsepower, but 1080i needs LOTS. Don't kid yourself.

Check the bandwidth of your onboard graphics using GPU-Z.

I decided to upgrade my GDDR5 HD5770 card (108W, which required one 6-pin PCIe power connection from the PSU to support its 76,800Gb/s bandwidth) when Aida64 showed me using about 70% GPU capacity when viewing 1080i on my own 24" local Eizo monitor (1920x1200) while also working in other programs on my second 24" Eizo monitor. I installed a GDDR5 HD5870 (188W, which now required two 6-pin PCIe power connections from the PSU to support the GPU with 153,600Gb/s bandwidth) and 1080i GPU usage dropped to about 36%. But smoothness improvement of the image (and elimination of lip-sync problem, especially on NBCHD) was noticeable.

In the interests of trying to reduce my electrical consumption and believing I would be tolerant of the resulting graphics performance decrease, I downgraded to a GDDR5 R7 250 (65W, requiring NO additional PCIe power connection from the PSU, with 73,600Gb/s bandwidth). I have to say, the graphics degradation is noticeable while watching 1080i when I'm running a second window (e.g. Firefox browsing web sites that have graphics) that also needs GPU horsepower. I'm not unhappy, but it's noticeable. A bit inferior to the original HD5770, and much inferior to the HD5870.

Of course watching HDTV on one monitor while working in a non-graphics-intensive program in a second window on the other monitor doesn't produce any jitter in the 1080i image. This really only occurs when launching/starting additional program windows, and/or when the other window(s) require decent graphics capability of their own. All in all the R7 250 is "perfectly adequate and acceptable" for my needs when watching HDTV on one monitor while working on the second monitor, with significant degradation only noticeable under certain circumstances as explained above.

If your HTPC can accept it, I'd consider spending a little money on a GDDR5 R7 250 (identical to the GDDR5 HD7750, just re-branded), as a very significant graphics upgrade from your onboard HD4600. Big difference with 1GB of dedicated GDDR5 memory, plus significantly stronger GPU. Again, use GPU-Z to check your current bandwidth (which I think is 25,600Gb/s bandwidth?) vs. the GDDR5 R7 250 (73,600Gb/s bandwidth).

It comes in a low-profile form from Sapphire which includes a full-size bracket as well, so you can use it in either a SFF or tower case. I've also got the same low-power card installed in two Lenovo M93p machines which come with very modest 280W PSU's and the video card works just fine.

[adam1991]

<snort> I've been watching TV just fine via the onboard video of my DH55TC mobo with my i3 processor, out via HDMI to 1080i. And I put that together...3.5 years ago, when the motherboard was "well established in the marketplace".

1080i doesn't need "lots" of horsepower.

[cwinfield]

<snort> I've been watching TV just fine via the onboard video of my DH55TC mobo with my i3 processor, out via HDMI to 1080i. And I put that together...3.5 years ago, when the motherboard was "well established in the marketplace".

1080i doesn't need "lots" of horsepower.

I have to agree. The only issues with integrated intel before hd4000 is 29/59 bug. Other than that is the occasional amd and nvidia driver related problems. Sounds like your having a storage drive issue. Might even be ram or storage driver chipset related. Are you overclocking?

[adam1991]

(for the record, i3 Clarkdale specifically does *not* have any issues with 29/59 content switching. I lucked out on that.)

[cwinfield]

In Intel HD Graphics Panel make sure Contrast Enhancement is disabled. It is under video hit the down arrow next to video on the right of video, select image, enhancement select advanced. It is after noise reduction.

[Satch]

Hi everyone,

Here are my responses so far:

1. HD Sentinel shows now issues
2. I'm using one DVB-T dual tuner and a DVB-S2 quad tuner. All have latest drivers installed. Both are PCIE cards
3. Intel 4600 is sufficient for my needs. It was working just fine before this issue started happening out of the blue
4. I'm using DVBLink to feed the TV streams into WMC
5. I've already disabled contrast enhancement and that didn't work either
6. I've changed the SATA cable on my recorded TV drive and that made no difference

The really weird thing is that both live TV and recorded TV work just fine in VLC player. It's just WMC where everything is screwed. Scrolling around the WMC menu is very jittery too so there is definitely something wrong with it.

[cwinfield]

You could try increasing the priority of ehsell.exe in task manager processes from normal to realtime (right click on ehsell, set priority)

[Satch]

Ok it's working properly again. No real idea how I fixed it but I did the following things:

1. Installed Shark codec pack
2. Realised that I had UAC turned off (did so temporarily a couple of weeks ago and forgot to turn it back on!)
3. Uninstalled Shark codec pack

After several reboots everything came right. I just wonder if the native codecs somehow got corrupt and fixed themselves with an install and uninstall of Shark codec pack?

Thanks for everyone's help.

[Scallica]

Ok it's working properly again.

Good, now take a snapshot image of your system

[Satch]

It turns out that my recorded TV HDD failed even though HD Sentinel was showing it to be fine when it was up. That was the ultimate cause...

[milli260876]

Just had very similar issues. Made a symbolic link to a usb flash drive for temprec and all is well.
That'll teach me for getting a 2.5" hdd for rec tv I guess....

[Klinge]

Hi Satch

I am experiencing the exact same on my win 7 media center, stuttering menu system. When browsing around in recorded TV it randomly stops and pauses for up to half a minute before being able to browse further, same thing happens when trying to play a recording. I experience very long delays when trying to access a recording and playing it. It also stutters and pixelate in some of my recordings. When I finally is playing a recording it acts normal when pausing, skipping and fastforwarding.

My media center has been running without problems for a bit more than a year now and then this suddenly happen out of the blue. My media Center is a Mac Mini (mid 2010) GeForce 320M graphics, upgraded to 8 Gb RAM and 1 TB SATA disc, HD Homerun Tuner.

I have tried the following so far:
-Chkdisk, no errors
-SFC /Scannow, no errors
-Updated graphic driver to newest
-Disabled animations and sound in menu navigation
-Checked my system with Speccy, temperature seemed fine, no errors
-Uninstalled standard programs, Mediacenter and Win Mediaplayer, installed them again
-Created a new user account, used that to run WMC

All with NO effect... the problem is still there. I have no clue to what has happened.

Is it correct understood that you found a problem with your HDD which caused the issues?
How did you find the problem? Which diagnostics program?
And how did you fix it?

Hope someone can help.

[Klinge]

Fixed the issue. It was bad clusters on the disk which was the problem.

Ran Chkdsk again this time with the "Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors" option on.
http://support2.microsoft.com/kb/2641432

Then the problems started piling up and several clusters was fixed and after that the menu system i WMC ran at normal speed again.