MCE Stutter with Video

[p@55w0rd]

HELP!

Guys I recently rebuilt my MCE machine and seem to be having an issue with stutter I did not have before.

Here are my system specs

Asus A7N8X Deluxe
2500+ (Barton)
2x DDR400 Corsair
ATI 9800 XT built by ATI
2x Happague MCE 150's
generic modem (caller ID)
Nvidia decoders .67, 1.45, 1.50
XP MCE with all the latest patches from windows update
Nvidia 5.10 chipset/lan/sound drivers
I have tried using the catalyst ATI 5.6 with the ccc and without. 5.4's without the ccc and the 5.1's without the ccc.

With video I get a slight stutter I can see on the news tickers on FoxNews/CNN/CNBC. It usually happens 1-3 times a minute and is driving me crazy. I have tried different refresh rates with power strip (59.994, 59.996, 60), changing vertical sync on and off, overclocking video card, underclocking video card, overclocking processor, different timings with memory, and a barrage of other things to numerous to list. Anyone have any other suggestions?

[walford]

Do you have the same problem if you watch a recorded program? If not then I suspect that you may have a shared IRQ problem involving your tuner cards if you did not enable 24IRQ's in your BIOS before you installed MCE.

[p@55w0rd]

Recorded or live. I enabled 24 IRQ's.

[bzellinger]

If you're talking about getting a dropped audio and video for a split second, than I get that too. It probably happens once every 2 minutes, but it drives me crazy. It happens in 2 different machines and 2 different tuner cards. I believe it started happening when I installed my HDTV Wonder. Can't live without that so I'll take the occasional stutter.

[jimbighoss]

what are you guys using for sound card?? onboard sound can sometimes be a problem consistent with your complaints

[walford]

There have been reports of using the Nvidia DVD decoder when using the Catalyst 5.5 and 5.6 drivers at the ATI Website so it is reccomended that you don't use any ATI drivers later than the 5.4 drivers.
And yes it is a good idea to make sure that you have the latest MCE drivers from the manufacturer of your sound card because for some users that it has been the cause of theri stuttering problems.,

[p@55w0rd]

Well i think I have solved my problem. I decided to go ahead and rebuild it again only to discover this did not solve the issue. I decided to play around with the refresh rate again and decided to go lower. Well after several attempts with powerstrip I found that 59.4Hz was the magic number! At this frequency there is no stutter! I cannot explain why but this is my magic number.