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PeterBoard
Participating Frequently
November 22, 2009
Question

Streaming video playback issue from www.abc.net.au/iview

  • November 22, 2009
  • 2 replies
  • 7314 views

On the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's site that lets you catch up on TV shows you have missed I have an issue with my Media Center machine. Video playback plays fine for about the first 5 minutes and then it goes into a slow mode. The site uses Flash for playback of the video content.

The video goes all chuggy and slow. If I change the video quality setting in Flash from High or Medium to Low, then the problem goes away but there is no hardware smoothing of the video and so it looks all blocky.

I don't remember having this issue when the machine was using Windows XP using the ATI HD 2600 Pro video card. I have recently upgraded to Windows 7. I also have a laptop with an older ATI video, a 9600 and it doesn't have the problem. Hardware smoothing works fine and the video doesn't slow down.

I have tried Flash 9, the current Flash 10 and the beta flash 10.1 - all display this same problem.

My Media center has the following configuration

CPU: Intel P4 3.0 Ghz

Ram: 2Gb PC3200

Video Card: ATI HD 2600 Pro 512mb AGP

Motherboard Chipset: Gigabyte motherboard with Intel i865 chipset

I am running Windows 7 32bit edition.

My laptop which is working fine with Flash 10 installed has a P4 3Ghz CPU and is running Windows 7. So I know that Windows 7 and the same CPU specs can work fine. I have tried the ATI Catalyst 9.10 and 9.11 drivers. Both have this issue.

Any idea's on how to fix this?

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    2 replies

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    PeterBoardAuthor
    Participating Frequently
    March 6, 2010

    A few people had fixed their problem by vacuuming their CPU heat sink / fan. So I thought, what the heck, doesn't sound like a solution but I will give it a go. And it has fixed my problem. So the dust on the heat sink (which it had a bit as it was a few years old), looks like the problem, well more specifically the CPU getting to hot.

    Although I don't suppose that every user will be comfortable with pulling their CPU heat sink apart, it did fix my problem.

    I also had noticed that my Hardware Acceleration in Windows Media Center would stop, so it got me to thinking it wasn't just Flash that was turning off Hardware Acceleration. I mainly noticed this when watching High Definition tv, which puts more CPU load on the system.

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    PeterBoardAuthor
    Participating Frequently
    November 24, 2009

    I found this post with basically the same issue, or very close

    http://www.w7forums.com/ati-driver-bug-t1644.html

    The difference I have is that I can play back Bluray movies with H.264 acceleration fine. I don't have hard drives stopping as well.

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    PeterBoardAuthor
    Participating Frequently
    November 24, 2009

    I have just been playing back video content and watching my GPU usage / temperature.

    When the flash video goes all choppy its because the system is not using the GPU in the video card. Normally the gpu sits between 60-85% usage when doing hardware smoothing on the video stream. As soon as it turns it off (why it turns off I am not sure) the video goes to being choppy.

    If I pause the video stream and give it about 1 minute and then press play again, the flash video stream starts using the GPU again.

    If I pause and play after just a few seconds, the GPU is not engaged. So I am wondering if its turning the hardware acceleration off because of power or temperature.

    I am going to try removing one or two hard drives and see what happens.

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    PeterBoardAuthor
    Participating Frequently
    November 24, 2009

    The removal of the hard drives doesn't seem to have resolved the issue. Its definately disabling the GPU still for some reason that I don't understand.

    Is there any way to debug the flash application for it to tell why GPU acceleration is being turned off?

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