[razardica]

Hey guys -

First, thanks for this outstanding resource. I have learned a lot just lurking. Unfortunately, I have a question...

I have an Acer Revo 3700 with XBMC. The program itself runs great - but the media does not. I get occasionally jerky picture.

I have a 2TB WD Green inside a USB 2.0 enclosure.

I used the 'o' key to bring up the playback stats and I am not dropping any frames. I am also not watching massive movies. It's chuggy on 720p occasionally and on modestly encoded 1080p stuff too. No more than the 720p though.

Any ideas? Is there a way to setup caching on my internal drive? Unfortunately, this computer doesn't have eSATA like I had read it did. Is the USB2 bottlenecking me?

Thanks for any help.

[outatouch0]

it COULD be the USB 2.0 itself as a hardware or driver issue on your HTTC. However, USB 2.0 plugged direct into the PC should work just fine.

I think it more likely to be the USB enclosure itself or in combination with the WD Green drive. Is this an external enclosure that you put the green drive in? I have not had much luck with external enclosures lasting very long. I had one corrupt a whole HD. They are usually cheaply made by "No Name" companies. Sadly, I have had to give up on them.
The green series drives are not built for speed but I believe many people use them for HD movies without problems.

[razardica]

Yes, I put the WD Green HD in an external enclosure.

I am dropping maybe 1 frame a minute (imperceptible) but the jitter is around 11ms when I am using MPC...I don't know of a way to measure jitter with XBMC.

Anybody else have any ideas specific to the Revo 3700?

[poofyhairguy]

Is the USB2 bottlenecking me?

Thanks for any help.

No. USB2 can do 720p. Well, let me not say that. Bitrate matters more than anything.

Let me say it this way- if your movie is 12mbs or under, it must be something else (a cable maybe? USB cables go bad randomly).

[numb7rs]

You could copy a movie to the local drive and play it, then you'd see if it is the drive or the system.

[razardica]

You could copy a movie to the local drive and play it, then you'd see if it is the drive or the system.

I actually did this and I was still getting some jitter reported by MPC.

I'm logging right now....so I will post it later.

My memory is hovering right around 1GB out of 2GB and the FPS is locked at 24 fps. My CPU never really goes above 15% or so. This is 720p video.

However, I still get occasional lag. Is there a way to see what the disk usage is like?

Also, restating - is it possible to set up caching on the internal disk? Or, rather, should I do a RAID/unRAID with the internal disk and the external USB disk (and never remove it)? Is that even possible?

Assuming my disk bandwidth is the bottleneck...anybody have any novel ideas for how I can do a 2TB 3.5" drive as the main internal drive on a Revo 3700?

Thanks, again, everybody.

[gabbott]

Assuming my disk bandwidth is the bottleneck...anybody have any novel ideas for how I can do a 2TB 3.5" drive as the main internal drive on a Revo 3700?

Thanks, again, everybody.

The Revo should have an eSATA port you could use.

[eskro]

like i said on another thread,
On those nettops,
always make sure to allocate 512MB of Shared memory to the integrated video...
check in your BIOS as this feature is sometimes named differently,,,
see image --> http://pcper.com/images/reviews/768/bios6.jpg
But im sure you'll find it!

[razardica]

The Revo should have an eSATA port you could use.

I have the 3700 - which, for whatever reason does not have an eSATA port.

eskro, do you know off the top of your head if there is there a way to set that on these 3700s? I didn't see it in the BIOS. It reports as 512MBs in the device manager so it might be that by default.

Also, this stuff is playing either flawlessly or much better to the point where I can't perceive issues any longer in MPC-HD.

Should there be different vsync issues I mess with? Should I be allowing XBMC to change the refresh rate?

[PatrickVogeli]

USB2 is not at fault.. I have lots of 720p and 1080p movies stored in an external USB 2TB harddrive and it works well.. no troubles. I have also tried my over 30GB avatar remux and it works fine too (well, it does in openelec pre-eden).

A USB drive should be able to do over 20MB/s without troubles... that would be a 160 Mbps bitrate file. For example, a 30GB 2 hour video file would be ~34 Mbps. And I doubt any 720p file you have is even half of that..

You may have a faulty component. However, you say in MPC-HD it works fine... Hum. I suppose you have set up hardware acceleration correctly? When you press 'o' playing a 720p or 1080p file, do you see something like ffmpeg_vdpau-vdpau or similar??