Vista MediaCenter - configuration (registry) to avoid stuttering

[Tahseen Shahzad]

Whenever I am trying to record any videos then I am getting the stuttering video taken on a Windows Vista Machine that has 2gb of ram and Pentium Dual core cpu. So, I followed a website to solve this issue and tweaked some values in the registry without the knowledge exactly what they do. I am still figuring the final values for HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media
Center\Service\Video\Tuners\DVR]
"AsyncIoBufferSizeBytes"=dword:00080000
"AsyncIoWriterBufferPoolCount"=dword:00000028
"BufferPoolTotalMillis"=dword:00000bb8
"BufferPoolSize"=dword:00000200
"AsyncIoReaderBufferPoolCount"=dword:0000005a
"BufferPoolMaxPerStream"=dword:00000300

After doing that the stuttering went down and it hardly occured, but I want to know what exactly I have done?

[Tomthegreat]

Incase your disks are using DMA transfers buffering then it wont be a problem. If you are using Raid 0 then it is possible that the retrival time from the disk is longer and it will be just using a single drive because the large cache buffers on todays hard drives that do a better job of looking forware to what you may retrieve next and then the Raid 0 system does in combining the returns from multiple hard drives into a single disk buffer.

[riggy001]

I just found a hexadecimal calculator here which told me that the dword value for "AsyncIoReaderBufferPoolCount" of 5a with the original value of 1e is not 4x, but 3x.

1e x 4 = 78

78 x 4 = 1e0

1e x 3 = 5a

5a x 3 = 10e

All the other values panned out as 2x.

I am still having the stutter problem, although much less pronounced since doubling the dword values (and tripling the dword value for "AsyncIoReaderBufferPoolCount").

Should I change the value for "AsyncIoReaderBufferPoolCount" to dword=78 (4x), or should I redouble everything but "AsyncIoReaderBufferPoolCount" and make that 6x (dword=10e)?

That is, should I correct the "AsyncIoReaderBufferPoolCount" to make it 4x (and not the 3x reported here),

OR, should I redouble everything, and if so, should I make the "AsyncIoReaderBufferPoolCount" = 6x or 8x? (10e or 1e0)?

I only got the glitch after getting an update after which I was able to see closed captioning.

ASUS Essentio CG5270-BP003 refurb; CPU=Intel Core 2 Quad Q8300 @ 2.50GHz; Vista Home Premium 64-bit Media Center Edition SP2 (UK); 8GB DDR2 RAM (4 x 2GB); Nvidia GeForce GT 220 PCIe display adapter (oem); Pinnacle PCTV 880e HDTV Ultimate Stick (USA only) on USB (TV tuner using Composite In with DirecTV box, and OTA DTV channels are programmed into the stick and do work with the Pinnacle TVCenter)(running most recent TVCenter beta with the DistanTV on port 8000, trial expired)); HDD=OEM Seagate 750GB on SATA0 (came with), aftmkt Seagate 300GB on IDE0 (had to turn on the JBE386 in BIOS), and aftmkt Seagate 1TB on SATA1 (gutted from a usb drive), and the optical drive is on SATA6 (CD/DVD-D/L +-R/W 16x).