I have a PVR 150 with R5A16. As the title suggests, the video is "choppy". It is not a dropped frame type of choppiness. It's almost like watching TV through a strobe. It is most noticeable when watching sports. It's like a strobe effect when there is a lot of quick movement. At times, "lines" are visible as well. My first thought was that it could have something to do with NTSC vs. PAL (i'm in the US), but upon further inspection I ruled that out (i think). I also tried toggling the de-interlace option, but it didn't seem to have an effect. I'm using a GF2MX to output S-Video by the way. The system is not underpowered (sempron 2800+ & 512 meg of ram). Has anyone had similar experiences? Thanks.

-Brian

1) Hardware details!!! (See my signature block for a sparse example) Otherwise we're playing "Doctor it hurts!" and you're getting guesses not diagnostics.

2) Have you eliminated all of the usual suspects? Have you got DMA enabled on your HD? Are you using the nvidia driver for X rather than the nv or vesa driver? Have you remotely monitored the system using top during playback?

3) The Dr. says "Take two searches of the forums and post again in the morning."

I'm using the nvidia drivers (whatever the most recent version is) with nvtv to ouput S-video to a television
DMA is enabled (hdparm says so)
System specs:
GF2MX (AGP of course)
VIA K8M800 Chipset
AMD Sempron 2800+
300 gig 8mb cache, 7200rpm
512 meg ddr (pretty sure it's 400mhz FSB)
Hauppauge 150 (non-mce)
On board sound & lan (lan is realtek 8139...not sure what the sound is)
from the software side of things, it's pretty much a stock knoppmyth install. other than modification to my X settings

I've searched the forums many times, but haven't seen anyone with similar problems. I don't think it's a resource problem, but I'll check to see if something is hogging the CPU/memory during playback. What usual suspects are there?

Hmmm... Via chipset is always a red flag, I don't remember if the 800 fixes the DMA problems that plagued people with the earlier versions. Other than that the three things I listed were the usual suspects...

As for looking for load hogs, just ssh in, run "top", and watch it. When you see a glitch look at the top 2-3 processes, the idle %, and if anything popped to the top of the list... Also keep an eye on the load average which should not be more than 1 if things are going to run smoothly.

Other things to do... Go spelunking in the boot logs (i.e. /var/log/dmesg) for any hardware issues. Check the X log /var/log/XFree86.0.log for any problems like "Can't load XVideo extension".

Here is a screenshot of the problem. I think it has to do with my capture settings. Notice the "lines" where there is movement? By the way, this screenshot was taken on a different frontend, but the same backend. This is why I believe the problem is related to my caputre settings.

That's interlacing. The PVR series captures interlaced video, as it should. It's up to the application that displays it to deinterlace or not, depending on if you want/need it or not.

Gotcha. I think i found my solution:

http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=3658&highlight=bob+interlace

Bob de-interlacing! Thanks for your help.