Jerky playback with Radeon9600SE on TV-out

[akoten]

My movies, no matter which format (Matroska, OGM, AVI, Divx, Xvid, VP6, mp3, ogg, aac, ...) all play smoothly if a regular monitor is connected to my new ASUS graphics card (Radeon9600SE chipset). If a TV is connected (monitor disconnected!) the playback is jerky, even differing with formats: AVIs go out of A/V-synch, once in a while attempt to come back to synch by dropping (many) frames or (many) audio. OGMs show blanking audio once in a while, MKVs unregularly show stuttering playback, and so on.

Before this I had a Elsa Erazor III. With it's TV-out I did not have any problems with compressed movies, the only reason for me to upgrade was that DVDs and PVAs recorded from DVB played stuttering (because of speed issues I guess). Now, however, the latter works fine with the new ASUS card even on my TV.

I tried Reclock and had some success: No more dropping of many consecutive frames (audio or video)! Stuttering was reduced, too, but not completely removed (can be clearly seen with the Vsynch-vertical bar switched on). Task bar icon is green btw. I see differences with audio format forwarded to Reclock. If the audio decoder output is configured "16-bit integer" then stuttering occurs more often, if it is "float" it occurs less often.

I have latest graphics card drivers, no theatre or clone mode, or anything else reported elsewhere in conjunction with jerky playback...

Maybe a hardware issue? PCI-Latency? Any ideas?

AKo

[Slogra]

Not sure if it works cause i haven't used my tvout on my new radeon much but:
Try settings your monitor to the same refresh rate as your tv
OR
Try making the TV the primary output device and monitor secondary

I've got a Radeon 9800SE but i found the TV-out nothing less that UGLY compared to my Geforce ti4400. The Radeons' looks very sandy :(. I tried all kinds of stuff... but nothing solved it so far. Do you have this problem too?

EDIT: i just read your post better and i read that you had your monitor disconnected so i guess my suggested aren't gonna help yo much, sorry :(

[akoten]

Originally posted by Slogra
Not sure if it works cause i haven't used my tvout on my new radeon much but:
Try settings your monitor to the same refresh rate as your tv
OR
Try making the TV the primary output device and monitor secondary

I've got a Radeon 9800SE but i found the TV-out nothing less that UGLY compared to my Geforce ti4400. The Radeons' looks very sandy :(. I tried all kinds of stuff... but nothing solved it so far. Do you have this problem too?

EDIT: i just read your post better and i read that you had your monitor disconnected so i guess my suggested aren't gonna help yo much, sorry :(

Well, I have another computer with an ASUS TI4200 card inside. What's your opinion, which one is better suited for fast gaming? I'm hesitating a little to swap cards for good because especially graphics cards do a lot with the registry, and my experience says, that not seldom windows has to be reinstalled upon change of a graphics card.

And YES, I have the same feeling like you, that TV-out quality is a bit poor with the Radeon9600SE - for me compared with the ErazorIII.

AKo

[doomed@ripping]

What color depth are you using for the TV output... I had a similar problem and dropping to 16bit did the trick as I was on 32 bit before... also reduce resolution if that doesn't work... Reducing screen res to 800 X 600 with 16bit depth might help...

[ECY]

Originally posted by akoten

Well, I have another computer with an ASUS TI4200 card inside. What's your opinion, which one is better suited for fast gaming?

the TI4200 is faster than the 9600SE

as for thr TVout problem
it might be a driver problem (under winXP)
since i change my HTPC (with 9600SE) to linux (Geexbox), i don't have flickering problems anymore
So it might be a driver problem in your case as well, try reinstall the lastest driver
(make sure to make clean uninstall of your current driver)

[akoten]

Sorry for the big delay, had to test all of your suggestions. Switching to 16-bit did not help in any way, and btw picture quality would not have satisfied me for quite a long time... 800x600 was my resolution before, so I tried 640x480, but - guess what - jerkiness became heavier! I think this is because most of my movies are compressed with 800xXXX resolution and so there is no need for the card to downsize the movie.

So I had some more experiments with ReClock 1.4:

First of all I noticed, that making audio output 32-bit float would improve a lot. Any idea why? But the so-called matrix-mixer dshow-filter did not load with active ReClock. So I had to configure manual filter graphs in ZoomPlayer. MUCH better now, but not perfect. So I had experiments with the Vsync-position slider of ReClock. I found a perfect position here, but unfortunately there seems to be such for each movie :(. I probably noticed a bug with ReClock, because in some cases (movies) it will not even try to correct the Vsync-position to the desired band. I had this permanently with 4:3 movies (Vsync always located in the vertical blank) and temporarily with cinemascope movies (sometimes it takes over 15 min. to get into the band). BTW: With 4:3 movies I can see what causes the jerkiness: the upper tenth of the screen is always smooth, it's the rest of the screen which sometimes stutters. The Vsync-indicator of ReClock indicates stuttering some moments before it happens by vertically "broadening" it's Vsync-"cross". This stops once ReClock managed to autocorrect the Vsync position. Looks like there is a bottleneck sometimes preventing data transfer to the graphics card in real time. But why should this be in TV-Out-mode only? And why only with media played via dshow? There are no problems with recorded MPGs from DVB card even on TV-out...

Most probably you are right and there is a driver issue. But unfortunately that was my first idea and I also knew, that special care has to be taken to clean uninstall everything before. I don't want to wait for new drivers, so what graphics card is known to be cheapest and best for TV-out and multimedia-only applications?

My next experiment will be the VideoLAN media player. This player does not use dshow... I'll let you know.

regards
AKo