Streamerp2p Forum

I've noticed a reproducable playback issue on two listener machines I'm using for testing: a Duron 800 with a cheap Avance soundcard and a P3-900 laptop with builtin audio. I'm testing across a LAN so bandwidth isn't an issue. Stream is a 32kbps mp3 and all machines are set at 128kbps upload/download.

The issue:

I connect the machines and they playback fine. Then I open a web browser and load a graphics-intensive page (e.g. http://abcnews.go.com/). During page-loading, and if I scroll the loaded page rapidly up/down, the playback stutters. This is most noticeable using Firefox 1.5, but also occurs (to a lesser degree) with IE6.

As an experiment, I tried changing the priority of the streamer.exe process on the listening machines (I have Windows 2000 on both). Increasing the priority from 'normal' to 'above normal' cures the stuttering issue. Playback remains stable regardless what I do in the web browser.

I should add that I don't experience this issue on a third test machine -- a higher-end P4. And also, the two 'stuttering' test machines have no issues with other streaming audio sources, e.g. http://www.cbc.ca/listen/index.html

Any ideas, anyone? Changing the priority of a running streamer.exe process isn't a solution to the issue, but perhaps provides a clue as to the cause of the problem.

I have the same here on a amd xp64-3000, it's a bug in streamer...
It also happens when scrolling streamers' stationlist.
Hope it will be fixed in next version (coming soon )

dont get the 2 problems confused there stage..

yes there is an issue if you scroll the streamer window itself, but this is NOT the same issue that was originally described by the original poster.

The first problem sounds simply like a resources problem with the PC. I get the same issue, (scrolling OTHER windows) when i run streamer under Virtual PC on my Mac, and the same way to fix it applies...

The problem with scrolling the streamer window itself, has existed for a while and isnt solved by changing the process priority.

Correct oh Dark One. If you grab the Streamer window and hold it with your mouse, everything Streamer will stop. It has to do with the process loop on a window drag or move and has been present in Streamer for some time. If you search the forum, I"m sure you will find earlier references to both issues.

On one test machine -- the Duron 800 -- I installed Winamp and set Streamer to use it as the external player. Streaming playback is now perfect, with no sign of the stuttering when I load and scroll a browser window. This would seem to rule out a basic resource issue on the machine.

Yes that's true. THe problem lies with the internal player.

I swapped the Avance soundcard in the Duron 800 for a Soundblaster Live 5.1. Installed the latest drivers from Creative and checked that DirectX is up to date.

On that machine now, the internal player is terrible -- a lot of static which just about drowns out the stream. But using the external player (Winamp) works fine, actually better than before as occasional buffering (that happened previously) is now gone.

I've found some references to static noise problems with SB Live cards and the VIA chipset (which the Duron uses), but it's odd that it only affect the internal player in Streamer. Both Winamp and WMP play various file types with no issue.

I've not had anything quite that drastic here, but on one of my machines I had some stuttering problems with Winamp when I would type on the keyboard in another application. While this may or may not be related, here's what the fix was.

It seems that some AMD and NForce boards install XP with the ACPI Uniprocessor HAL. Changing this to the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface Computer HAL cured the problem. One would think that they would be the same, but I guess they are not.

Be aware any who try and change their HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) that you can break your OS so that you can no longer boot and you should research the different methods available to change it back before you start.

I've traced the problem to the use of CPUIdle (http://www.cpuidle.de/) a software cooling program. If I shutdown CPUIdle then Streamer's internal player is OK (well, the static is gone but the stutter I described in the original post is still there). This is with the Soundblaster board -- CPUIdle didn't create an issue with the previous Avance soundboard. I think I'll keep the Soundblaster however -- it's just about eliminated buffer underruns. 5 hours of playback in Winamp this afternoon without a single buffer underrun, whereas with the Avance board there'd be an underrun every couple or three minutes.

Streamer's main core loop is rather inelegantly tied in with the windows message handling. If windows pauses this for a moment, streamer's core freezes too. This stops data being fed to the internal player, which although it hasn't frozen, does run out of data. Scrolling other windows may be pausing the messages. This is a guess btw. I haven't ever noticed this myself.