Sager 8130 - choppy online video

Example: cheap HP with i5 plays Hbogo movies flawlessly. My previous two HP DV6's also played Hbogo and netflix well. The 8130 plays on line video so that it looks a lot like Black Hawk Down--like it's constantly dropping a few frames, making motion look jerky.

Blu ray playback is fine.

I don't understand how a pc with such a fast processor and video card can perform so poorly when watching videos through a browser.

Help, or this will be yet another laptop to go back. this is so frustrating--waiting for a custom laptop to be built, only to have it underperform. Ive been dealing with laptop issues since April. I thought the 3rd time would be the charm.

 

Is your Flash player up to date? What browser are you using?

 

just installed flash.

FF 5.0.1 and also tried IE9. neither one renders hbogo or netflix movies smoothly. when watching either, on a HP dm4 (i5, $800 laptop) videos play very smoothly, essentially as fluidly as watching live TV.

 

What video driver are you using? Trying to throw out ideas. :S

 

Have you tried enabling (or disabling) GPU/hardware acceleration on the browsers?

 

8.17.12.6849


dated 5/5

 

never heard of doing that with FF. is that possible? how?

 

First link in a Google search.

 

thanks. DUH! I've been on the FF Advanced Options>General tab many times, and never noticed that, even today when I looked before posting. I switched it back and forth between enabled and disabled but don't see any improvement either way.

 

I dont see any issues in our DB that are similar to this. Do you want to try another video driver and see if there is any difference? Does YouTube play ok?

 

youtube videos play "ok", including 1080--they look the same as my wife's HP when playing HD youtube videos, for comparison. neither of us pays much attention to the quality of youtube video as a rule, because we don't expect much. However, we have spent many hours streaming HBOGo from her laptop to one of our big screen TV's so I'm fairly familiar with the quality of HboGo. Having said that, here comes the REALLY, REALLY confusing thing of all: after having poor playback of several videos in HBOGo on my Sager, that play very well on her HP, I took my laptop back into my homeoffice and plugged it back in to power to see if that helped. It didn't. then I tried the browser "turn off acceleration" thing and that made no difference. I toggled it back and forth countless times--no apparent affect. THen I dinked around with the Nvidia utility but only for 3D settings like various levels of game related parameters. I kept trying various videos, and finally went back to the exact same episode of Curb your Enthusiasm that was jerky earlier and it plays fluidly now--just as if I was watching it on a regular TV. Go figure. Even unplugged, it plays smooth, back in the kitchen (away from the router which sits on one of my desks in the office) where my initial problems occurred. very confusing. no idea what's changed to improve HBO playback. This reminds me of a previous desktop that used to drive me nuts getting consistent frame rates from FS2004. One time the FR were normal, and other times it was a slug. Computers!! can't live with them and can't live without them.

PS. My wife also saw the poor performance initially, of my Sager doing HBO, and she concurred that now it looks fine, so it's not "just me" that's observed both the problem and the better current playback quality. I am so stumped.

 

JP, given what I wrote in my last post, I don't think I need to change the driver. Early today I had Win check for an update and it found none, and I didn't pursue it any further.

 

Could you have had something running in the background that took up a lot of resources?

 

Windows Updates doesn't do a very good job of finding the latest video card drivers, if you go onto nVIDIA's site you can get the newest drivers (even Beta drivers still being tested ) which offer performance boosts in games and bug fixes as well.

 

I'm putting together everything you've said. Here's some questions I have and something to try to see if it affects behavior.

So this third laptop, is it the third high-end one, with an i7 processor? One that is a quad core / 8 thread laptop? And you have had THIS exact same problem on all your machines [EDIT: the other 2 you returned]?

The main difference is the i5 has 2 cores and 4 threads.


My idea that ties stuff together is this: I'm not familiar with HBogo movies, how smart it, or flash, or firefox are about the usage of your cores and threads. Maybe, there is an issue when in this situation it has more cores/threads available than it does on your i5, and maybe it doesn't like using those virtual cores (Threads).

Thing to try on your NP8130:

• Start up FireFox, get to the webpage you need. (Make sure this is your only instance / tab that is open)
• Get everything ready to go and play a movie like you normally do.
• Right click on the start menu bar anywhere it's empty and choose "Task manager"
• Find FireFox under the Application area.
• Right click on it and "Go to Process"
• On the highlighted process, right click and "Set Affinity"
• Try playing with cores it is allowed to use.
  (I would start off by only using "0", one physical core)
  (I'm not sure how the threads/cores number ... like every other, or 4 physical then 4 virtual... but see if you get any difference in playing here.

Should this have a positive effect, we can talk about making a special shortcut to force processor affinity to the way you need when you're going to play movies like this in a web browser.

It's the only thing I can think of that ties all your symptoms together.

 

You posted this while I was writing my first post up... Ok this is wild, but cool.

Ideas: Reboot and see if your movies keep on playing well. If so, revert your settings in the NVidia Control Panel (can you save a profile first? I forget) back to defaults and make sure the problem returns.

Try to lock in on what is the magic setting that fixed you, and report back!

Otherwise, this could be a phase of the moon type thing as to which thread/cores are getting tasked to be used, and the coincidence is, it's in a situation it now likes. (See my previous post for ideas on how to try to reproduce, then rectify the behavior)

 

Something others haven't mentioned, but sounds plausible to me- are you running this over WiFi or wired? Can you turn off the WiFi and wire in to your network and see if that helps? You may need to tweak your wireless settings if it's causing the slowdown.

 

I noticed when I watched The Daily Show online, when in the small windowed mode, the video was a bit choppy. I set it to full screen and smooth as butter. Maybe something to try.

Small window seemed to work fine on YouTube, however. I use Chrome on the 8130.

 

nope. i don't have much running, and blu ray movies, youtube, FSX all run fine. and now, as I just mentioned in my last post, HBOGo seems fine, despite a whole lot of time this morning with it running poorly during a period of time when we'd switch over to my wife's HP, where it ALWAYS ran smoothly. Just a few moments of time between alternating between laptops to check how HBOGo performed on each of our laptops.

 

thanks. i did both the initial-size window and full screen. the problem was present at both sizes, and then when it cleared up later, both sizes were fine.. I am really stumped at why the fluidity of motion finally began to show itself on my Sager. I can't think of anything substantive that I did that would have corrected the issue.

(and I'll try chrome later on if I see more issues--thanks)

 

wifi was tested as 22-24MBs several times. i've got a speedy Comcast internet service. and the problem occurred both right next to the router, and my wife's HP laptop plays streaming video fine all over the house, as did my Sager long after I created this thread--which is why I'm so puzzled.

 

Did I read that right that you first encountered the choppiness while on battery?

 

yes, BUT it persisted when plugged in and power set to high performance too.

it's not grossly jerky--the best I can describe it is it's a bit like Blackhawk Down. and I've still no idea why later on, it began working fine on battery, or why it performed badly while plugged in.

i just ran 3dmarks and got 8818. that app says it's a low score. i've no idea what it should be for a unit like mine.

 

The app just wants you to buy some of its software. you should completely ignore that "your score is low" thing. Those freaking sites probably don't know what the heck a Clevo laptop is, let alone be able to compare it to other clevos in the same power class.