CoreAVC slight FPS dropping ocasionally, help please.

[ederol2]

Dear members of the forum:
I am new to the community and glad im part of it I hope if anyone can help me with this please.

I output video from my laptop (a Compaq AMD Athlon 64 X2 TK57 1.9 GHz with a Geforce 7150 integrated video on it) into a Samsung LCD 720p/1080i using a 7 pin s-video / component cord/adapter plugged into the component input of my LCD in order to play 1080p mkv files mostly. I have windows vista and I use media player classic with coreavc pro and haali media splitter. I dont have any other package of codecs installed on the system. For sound I use the analog output (3.5mm).

The problem is as follows (on 1080p files):

Every 4-5 minutes , theres a sudden FPS drop and then it resumes normally only to happen again at 4-5 minutes, and then the cycle continues. Its bothersome when playing action sequences , however its occurence its random. I can replay that same part and it will reproduce normally. I have set mpc to High priority in task manager (and normal priority to the rest of processes) and I disable any unnecesary processes during playback. But I still get the problem.CPU barely gets to 40% at most during playback. What I have noticed it is that it mostly (or only) happens when outputting to TV, but it reproduces ok in my notebook (1280x800 resolution).

So is there any tweak or special configuration in the codec itself or on the video card settings that could help me with this problem?. Is it something inherent to the codec? Will it help If I use Ac3 Filter for sound? (I have heard it helps with low volume playback which I have , is this true?). Is my processor not strong enough? or is it the integrated nvidia videocard the culprit?

I hope you can please help me, thanks in advance , and sorry for the long post.


Regards,
Ederol

 

[ederol2]

anyone has any clues please?

 

[timbow]

I think you are going to have to test by running task manager at the same time as playing a video to check that nothing else is kicking off when these anomolies occur.

Also, you should be aware that CoreAVC does not perform any hardware acceleration, so is susceptible to other processes using the CPU.

 

[ederol2]

Thanks for your answer timbow, I had looked up the task manager , and the only processes showing some activity are dwm.exe , crss.exe and explorer.exe , but they barely use 2% of cpu power when they come up. MPC peaks at 40% at most , and is set on High Priority (vista doesnt let me set it up to Realtime) . The only other application running is NOD32 (which I dont really want to disable) , but it never shows up as using any cpu power at all during playback.

I have read that the services running on vista are not susceptible to the priorities aforementioned, can those be the culprit? Will it help if i Install ac3filter at all? Can it be that since it is a component cable, its not fast enough? Any other ideas plz?

 

[Blu4KHD]

Have you tried using the MPEGVideoDec.ax filter instead of the coreavc one as the MPEGVideoDec.ax can be used for hardware DXVA encoding and uses around 2-5% cpu power compared to coreavc's 20-40%, The only downfall is that it will not accelerate VC-1 encodes.

 

[timbow]

If you are using Vista, make sure you click the "See processes from other users" (or whatever it says) button, otherwise you won't see some of the processes spawned by system users. Also, rather than using the processes tab, use the performance tab.

 

[timbow]

Have you tried using the MPEGVideoDec.ax filter instead of the coreavc one as the MPEGVideoDec.ax can be used for hardware DXVA encoding and uses around 2-5% cpu power compared to coreavc's 20-40%, The only downfall is that it will not accelerate VC-1 encodes.

Not heard of that one. Is it opensource? If so, where can it be downloaded from?

Cheers!!

 

[lmaolmao]

SourceForge.net: MPC - Homecinema: Files

main page:

http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net/

 

[timbow]

Thanks, never thought to look there!

 

[Jamesy_UK]

Just out of curiosity, is your laptop wireless, have seen similar issues when every few mins the laptop/pc will scan for new networks and cause some hiccuping issues and disabling the wireless has cured it. I believe turning off AP roaming also helped.

 

[ederol2]

Hi Jamesy, I had already disabled wireless with the wireless switch of my laptop. Is that enough or are there more steps to do (maybe closing some processes in vista i dont know). Excuse me , but I dont understand what you say about "AP roaming" , how do I disable it?

Timbow , thanks for the tip , Indeed I saw other system process but they cant be disabled.

Another thing I have noticed in windows vista since the beggining of my purchase, is that every 10 seconds or so the hard disk light blinks very fast, even though I have no other programs running (even with wireless switch off). I definitely dont have neither spyware nor viruses here. Can that also be part of the problem. How can I solve it?

Thanks for everything,
Regards,
Ederol

Update: I have closed the following services: superfetch , windows index search and readyboost. Even with all of that , I continue having that hiccups, from time to time. I have also tried with another player (kmplayer in superspeed mode and coreavc codec) , without any improvements. Could it just be that my processor is not powerful enough to continuosly output 1080p without hiccups?? Also I correct myself in that the slowdown happens both in my laptop and when outputting through the lcd tv. (before I just stated it happened on lcd only).