Herky Jerky Audio & Video

[wkm001]

When my HTPC is recording 3 or 4 HD shows via the Ceton InfiniTv PCI-E card the audio and video quality is very poor. The video and audio seem to pause/stutter. More times than not we are watching a show that is currently recording, but starting from the beginning. When fast forwarding through commercials the progress bar moves smoothly but the video jumps through large sections of the recording.

If I had to guess I would say this is some sort of throughput issue, probably involving the hard drive. Here is the hardware I'm using.
Mobo: ASUS M4A87TD EVO
OS HD: Western Digital Caviar Blue WD5000AAKS 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s
Recording HD: Western Digital Caviar Black WD1002FAEX 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s
CPU: AMD Athlon II X4 640 Propus 3.0GHz Socket AM3 95W Quad-Core
Video: ATI Radeon 5750
RAM: 4GB Ram
OS: Win 7 Ultimate

For reasons unknown I have the SATA ports set to IDE rather than AHCI. Would changing them to AHCI give me a lot more throughput? This would of course require a reinstall of the OS.

[assassin]

Yes, I would switch to AHCI.

And no, you don't necessarily have to completely reinstall the OS.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976

http://www.neowin.net/news/neowin-guide ... ng-windows

[wkm001]

Thanks for the links! The software made switching from IDE to AHCI really easy. It also made a huge difference in drive performance. I can now easily record 4 shows in HD and play a 5th with no video or audio skipping.

[STC]

Nice advice assassin. I've been there, done that