[mythtv-users] Resolved, mostly: HD Choppy or Jerky

[Hika van den Hoven]

Hoi Dick,

Tuesday, February 4, 2014, 1:21:15 AM, you wrote:

> On 02/01/2014 08:49 PM, Dick Steffens wrote:
>> I have come up with a test that I hope will help determine if network 
>> speed is the issue.
>> <snip>
>> My plan is to move the HDHomeRun Prime to the living room, using a 
>> splitter there so it shares the RG-mumble cable feeding my old Comcast 
>> cable box. Connect the Ethernet side of the HDHomeRun Prime to the 
>> 10/100/1000 switch. Connect the Lenovo M58P to that same switch. Leave 
>> the connection to the router on that switch, too, since both of the 
>> other devices need DHCP from the router.
>>
>> If my assumption is correct, short, un-kinked CAT-5 cables going from 
>> the switch to the HDHomeRun Prime and my Lenovo should operate at 1000 
>> when talking to each other. The only time they would operate at 100 
>> would be while getting their IP assignment, or when the Lenovo needed 
>> to talk to the outside world.

> As it turns out I did not have a 10/100/1000 switch like I thought. I 
> moved the HDHomeRun Prime down to the living room and hooked it up as 
> described above, but with just a 10/100 switch. There actually was a 
> slight improvement, but not good enough to watch the game. I got a 
> 10/100/1000 switch today and swapped it out with the 10/100 one. It 
> makes a difference, but doesn't completely clean things up. There are 
> still video drop outs, and out of sync sound, but to a lesser degree 
> than before the 10/100/1000 switch went in. I'm still using the 
> HDHomeRun Config GUI to connect to a station. It's definitely not 
> convenient, but it works. One advantage of it is that it has some signal
> strength indicators that I can observe. Here are two examples:

> Physical Channel qam256:76 has channels 703 - KRCW HD, 712 - KPTV HD, 
> 304 - ANTENNA, and 303 - THISTV. The signal strength is shown in red and
> floats between 65 and 66%. The signal quality is shown in yellow and 
> floats between 52 and 53%. The Symbol Quality is shown in green and 
> stays at 100%.

> Physical Channel qam256:14 has channels 709 - WGN-HD, 710 KOPB HD, and
> 310 - OPBPLUS KOPB2. The signal strength is shown in yellow and stays 
> around 80%. The signal quality is shown in green and floats between 98
> and 100%. The Symbol Quality is shown in green and stays at 100%.

> As you would expect from those numbers, a program on 710 is much cleaner
> than one on 712. 710 is clean enough to call good enough -- no obvious
> video drop outs, and the audio is in sync.

> 712, on the other hand, had video drop outs and out of sync audio. It 
> was better than yesterday, but still not good enough to watch a program.
> 712 is FOX in this market, and was the channel the Super Bowl was on. We
> watched it on the standard definition transmission channel.

> There may be something Comcast can do to improve this, but I'm not 
> inclined to pursue that until I have MythTV working, since now that the
> football season is finished there is unlikely to be anything on the 
> local HD channels we'd want to see other than something on OPB. And OPB
> comes in nice and clean. Plus I don't have any problem with the standard
> definition channels.

> So for now, I'm going to declare this issue resolved, mostly, and move
> on to getting MythTV working. But that's for another thread.

> Thanks again to all for your input and advice.



I'm looking back at your original post and you describe only one
machine. Is that the backend or the frontend and what are the specs of
the other. Especially transcoding on the backend can take up cpu just
like decoding on the frontend. You could record cpu and memory usage
on both and store it in rrdtool. I could provide you with the script I
use for this and temp etc. monitoring.

Tot mails,
  Hika                            mailto:hikavdh at gmail.com

"Zonder hoop kun je niet leven
Zonder leven is er geen hoop
Het eeuwige dilemma
Zeker als je hoop moet vernietigen om te kunnen overleven!"

De lerende Mens
--