[Neilistic]

Hello all


Im relatively new to the HTPC scene and am looking to get some expert advice from some of your fine selves.


I have built my pc up and am experiencing some playback issues. I watch alot of downloaded TV shows like the Mentalist, True Blood, Heroes etc. which are HDTV rips but normal 350mb files. I have also also been given a 1TB hard drive that is literally full of movies which are mostly DVD rips. I also watch a fair few blu-ray ripped 1080p movies and 720p TV shows that are in MKV format.


My problem is that with the HD MKV files i experience only what I can call a stutter when watching. One moment it is running smooth as silk and then you notice a slight stutter which is very annoying.


Also im setting up a media library for all the films/TV shows I've got using with windows media centre using the media browser plugin (very tasty little program) but I am finding that the quality is better when playing a file in MPC-HT than Media Player. In media player the images seem a little blocky and a faint flicker in the brightness.



My questions are:


1. Is there any settings withing the Catalyst Centre or in the codecs that I can change to make playback smooth? Or can someone that has a similar setup tht might be able to tell me what settings they have that they use?


2. As Windows Media Centre uses Windows Media Player, is there anyway to improve the quality? Again is that likely to be a codec setting?


3. Is there any benefit to using an HDMI -> HDMI cable rather than the DVI -> HDMI im currently using? I seem to get more options in Catalyst Centre when using HDMI -> HDMI but not sure what they do.



I have a XFX ATI Radeon 5770 graphics card connected to my sony 40" W5500 TV via DVI -> HDMI running at 1080p. I have the Shark007 codecs intalled on Windows 7 64-bit.




Any help that anyone can give me would be most appreciated. And apologies if this seems long winded.




Thanks in advance



Neil

 

[justinm0424]

You should just use an HDMI-HDMI cable. Not sure of the advantages other than DTSHS, dolby truHD, HDCP. But everything seems to work a lot nicer and easier.

 

[mike_311]

in Media browser you can define an external player, you don't have to use the default windows player.


so if you want to use MPC-HC you can.


as far as your stutter problem goes, does you pc usage spike during the stutter?

 

[Neilistic]



Quote:
Originally Posted by mike_311 /forum/post/18247946


in Media browser you can define an external player, you don't have to use the default windows player.


so if you want to use MPC-HC you can.


as far as your stutter problem goes, does you pc usage spike during the stutter?

no the procs stay relatively low, its a Quad Core 2.something GHz.

 

[ogormask]

how much memory?


I was getting stuttering as well playing files like that. I noticed it took a while from a reboot to be "ready" to play stuff where if I selected a file to soon it would really grind the system to a halt. I recenly took my older 320gb seagate 7200 rpm drive and found another laying around here and made a raid 0. It seemed to have taken care of the problem. I could hear the drive crunching and crunching in the background before all the time. I dont know why drive speeds matter so much but it seemed to. Of course I also reformatted and windows always runs faster after reinstall. I would say memory or drive speed could be a factor here. bluray playback even ripped ones seems to take a lot of resources.

 

[sriramc]

You will see better performance when the hard drive is formatted for NTFS with 64KB allocation units. This will greatly reduce the number of disk read operations. So you might want to temporarily move your data, and reformat the drive to NTFS with 64KB allocation units.

 

[Neilistic]

Thank you for all your help so far.


Its got 4GB of memory, its pretty good stuff but cant remember what type.




Could it be anything to do with refresh rates? Sorry im not very knowledgeable in these things.

 

[mike_311]

what player are you using when you have stutter? is it limited to MCE or does MPC-HC do it too, what codecs are actually be used, ie did you switch any of them?


if you don't know check out graph studio, it will tell you what codecs are being used.

 

[nobisita]

Even though I've been messing with this stuff for many years, I too am a noob when it comes to the new graphics cards, frame rates, refresh rates, etc. to get perfect video performance. I did however have a similar problem a while back which I was able to correct by simply installing the OS on a separate drive. Haven't had a stutter in quite some time.

 

[Neilistic]

I've got the OS installed on a 150gb Velociraptor. And the media is on a Samsung SpinPoint F1 HD103UJ 1TB Hard Drive SATAII 7200rpm 32MB Cache.


It does it on both MPC-HT and WMP/WMC


Ive attached what Graph Studio outputs.