Network streaming help (mezzmo)

hotdog

hotdog

hotdog

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1 Aug 2006
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270
Hi,

I am looking for some help with streaming HD content to my TV:

I currently have a wolfdale 8500 cpu with 8gig ram and a raid0 HDD as my main PC sitting in the study/spare room. This is connected via cat6 to a chepo tp-link gigabit switch - from that i have a cat 6 cable running into the living room and connected to a philips 40'' TV.

I have installed Mezzmo to play MKV files on the fly but am having issues with jittery playback or stopping and starting...

I have read that the software transcodes on the fly but uses just the CPU to do this - am i right in thinking that the CPU is holding me back here?
I thought that it was still a fairly good CPU albeit aging now

Would changing to a quad core lga775 chip make any difference? Do i need to upgrade the whole lot or am i missing something?

Any help greatly appreciated
 
I'm running on an AMD Athlon with 2GB of RAM for my media server, running TVersity. Network bandwidth is 130mbps, encoding/decoding doesn't get CPU usage above 40%. I'm experiencing no lag/stuttering.

Perhaps you should try and stream a .MKV file to your HD TV, and then monitor network usage, cpu usage and memory usage. All of this can be monitored in taskmgr.
 
the switch is new and is definately a gigabit switch.

As an example a new title i am trying to play is around 12gig in size and 1080p encoded using MKV format.

I quite liked mezzmo so far due to the fact it encodes on the fly, i just have to select the file on the TV and then mezzmo takes care of the rest...
 
Have you looked at the resource usage? That's what should indicate where it's going wrong... But I suspect that when it's decoding it, it's maxing out the CPU.
 
yeah thats what i am seeing - the cpu is literally at 100% the whole time and then it is still jittering and jumping.
so is the fact that the wolfdale chip is not fast enough for 1080p
 
I'm not sure about Mezzmo, but in TVersity there's a setting so it doesn't decode it as fast as possible whilst streaming, instead you can set it so it only streams as it goes, it won't stream too far ahead, and that managed to decrease CPU usage for me.

But you'll probably be better off upgrading to a quad core anyway.
 
Even a modern i5/7 processor would break a bit of a sweat transcoding 1080p content at realtime. (At 12GB it's got a pretty hefty Bitrate also)

Of course the CPU can play it, but you are not playing (decoding it) you are re-encoding to a format compatible on your TV.
 
I use Mezzmo and i had the same problem.

The thing i did was if you go to your media device settings and click on the performance tab, you can alter the bitrate of the stream.

Now i've found pretty much no difference in setting it to the maximum lower quality, but i've played with it until i've reached a point where it provides best encoding without lagging.

Hope that helps a little.
 
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Thanks for the replies, so basically it would seem that these new and newish cpus have trouble encoding on the fly in realtime.
I will upgrade to a lga775 quadcore for the moment as i dont have the money to upgrade in full, i will see if that makes a difference (hope so!)

thanks everyone
 
Also, make sure that Mezzmo isn't compressing the video file when it's being streamed to your TV; this can cause high CPU usage as well.
 
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