Live TV stutters

Mikesin · 25 Oct 2015

After the debacle of guide information for Vista I was forced to upgrade a stable WMC to W7.

All BBC channnels on freeview SD exhibit this problem but no other channels. Selecting for example BBC1 brings up the picture which slowly starts to freeze/stutter getting progressively worse - unwatchable -and then races back to normal picture playback. Pressing the record button solves the problem i.e. the picture plays at normal speed. Any other remote control button being pressed is met with an unresponsive behaviour in this period.

I have installed and reinstalled W7 added 200 updates, cleared out rubbish files, checked drivers for currency, checked signal quality with ScanChannels BDA all without resolving the problem. I have purchased a second hand core duo 2.3GHz processor as an upgrade which will be the next step but I thought I would post the problem before I rip the hardware apart a step that is always fraught with potential problems.

ideas gratefully received

Mike

torchwood · 25 Oct 2015

Hi Mike,
Why not use Iplayer.
Works like a goodun.

Watching Doctor Who now

Roy

wasnotwas · 25 Oct 2015

Are your channels selecting the correct transmitter ? When I do a Media Center set-up, I always go through each station - R-click in epg, edit channel, edit sources - to make sure I'm not looking at a lower powered signal from an adjacent region. In this screenshot I have deselected the 71% signal and selected the 100% ones. WMC usually picks the correct signal, but not always on every station.

The % is shown at the bottom Frequency (Quality). On the machine in this shot, I have a quad tuner, so have 4 boxes ticked. For dual tuner, just select 2 etc.

Mikesin · 25 Oct 2015

Nice bit of work posting pic of tuner options screen - unfortunately for me I am on 100% signal .

So the processor went in without a problem and after fighting for a day with the fact that I had broken the Microsoft DRM rules by changing the processor I found a Fixit that allowed me to watch Live TV and Recorded programs. And I still have the freezing on Live Tv But what has become apparent is that it only occurs on a few channels - BBC1 BBC2 BBc News and I think on BBc3 and BBC4 . These are all on the same mux PSB1 but so is the Parliament channel which does not exhibit the problem, The signal is 100% quality. If I select BBC1 after a few seconds it starts to loose sync between picture and sound gets progressively worse until it is freeze frame and then starts to recover - it can re-occur when there is too much screen display activity or requests such as guide display. However pressing record makes it resync and maintain sync

When the problem exists switching to ITV or any non PSB1 channel is met with immediate sync which is maintained.

Watching BBC1 in a minimised screen is fine, dragging the minimised screen to a larger size eventually results in freezing etc,

CPU utilisation is around 25% when the problem was occurring. Screen resolution is 1920 x 1080 32 bit via hdmi to a samusung 32" flatscreen

I have tried messing around with the media center setting for display but cannot find any improvement that way - one curious thing is that when I play the adjustment video which is part the the Configure your TV or Monitor process the video shows itsa message that it is buffering when starting to play?

I have now set WMC TV setup to 720p and not 1080 as was the default(My Samsung HDMI does not support interlacing!). I now have no stuttering and am able to use all of the features (e.g guide overlay on Live TV) without problems. I can not detect any difference in TV picture quality so unless I have problems in the next few days I will consider this solved.

Live TV stutters

Live TV stutters

iplayer