I have split my system into a backend that sits in my office with lots of noisy disks and a remote front end that sits in the family room. The remote front-end is a P4-2.4GHZ that was able to play 1080i & 720p recordings when both the front-end and back-end were both on this box. Now that I have moved the backend to a different machine, 480i and 720p playback is still fine. 1080i playback has the following problems:

1. For the first 2-3 minutes I get a fraction-of-a-second pause in the playback every 5-10 seconds.

2. After 2-3 minutes of continuous playback, the problem goes away.

3. If I do any skips or pauses, the problem described in step one happens again.

My network is a 100mbps wired ethernet. I have both the front-end and back-end machine plugged into the same switch. I've tried two different switches -- one a netgear wireless router that includes a 4-port switch; the other a 5-port siemens switch. I've mesured a sustained throughput of 86mbps doing a cp from from the backend machine to the frontend machine. (I NFS mounted the back-end directory on the front-end machine and copied a 400megebyte file to get the timings.)

CPU utilizaton during playback never exceeds 88%, as measured by "top" using "top -d 1"; it is most typically running at 80% utilization.

Does anyone have any ideas what might be happening? One guess is that the front-end is not getting the data it needs quite fast enough for 1080i playback. If this is the case, is there some buffer size I can increase in mythtv so that it is transferring data in larger chunks across the network?

Any assistance would be appreciated -- thanks!

Marc

88% on the backend or the frontend?

1080i is actually easier on a system then 720p. 1080i is 540p (smaller res). So, doesn't make sense that 720p plays fine.

Is the frontend doing any de-interlacing? There is a couple settings you can set if I remember right. You could try different ones or none at all.

Also, what video card? have you double checked the video drivers. I noticed when I was testing stuff. If you boot the frontend and try to play HD content it doesn't work so hot because in my case it didn't have the nvidia drivers loaded. So, I loaded it to the HD and removed out the backend and it fixed my slow HD content playing problem.

-duhasst