Mac pro stuttering with video (any video any player).

[MADMAXX]

Evening all.

Im running a 2009 Mac Pro with 3 GT120's into 3 screens, 12gig o ram and a myriad of drives. Lately I find I cant play the simplest of things (like eye tv or quick time) with out it stalling/glitching every 3 seconds. Ive done the usual disk checking and ensuring nothing else is running but nothing works. Opened my test user too and it misbehaves in there too. Also just noticed that it seems to stall when Im typing this too? (TV is playing too).

Any ideas?

[philipma1957]

my eyetv has had problems for 3 or 4 days. This is on iMac and Macmini all off the air channels from 2 to 6 are doa. try running your macpro with eyetv deactivated.

[reel2reel]

Have you tried playing a video from a separate disk (other than the one you're playing it on now)?

[MADMAXX]

Hi all, its not just eye tv. I have tried all sorts of videos on the boot drive and the other 3 drives installed. Every 3 seconds it stutters then continues.

[OutThere]

You seem to have a lot of stuff hooked up to the computer, perhaps you could try unplugging things to see if the problem disappears?

While you mentioned that you checked for this—I will mention that whenever this kind of thing happens 99% of the time I find some rogue process in the Activity Monitor that's either using 150% of the CPU or thrashing my hard drive.

[MADMAXX]

Disconnected everything. Still no joy.
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4130/4974514701_16c9cbde9f.jpg

[philipma1957]

reboot with everything disconnected

[MADMAXX]

Did that too!

[reel2reel]

Did you try playing it from another drive?

I solve this kind of crap all day at work. Best to start knocking things off a list, even simple things.

[MADMAXX]

Hi all, its not just eye tv. I have tried all sorts of videos on the boot drive and the other 3 drives installed. Every 3 seconds it stutters then continues.

See above. It seems to be anything graphical. Slight pauses when I type and scrolling left to right on task bar it does the same little glitch. Wonder if one of the cards is ****ed? Or could it be **** code in an OS update?

[reel2reel]

See above. It seems to be anything graphical. Slight pauses when I type and scrolling left to right on task bar it does the same little glitch. Wonder if one of the cards is ****ed? Or could it be **** code in an OS update?

Do you have a 2nd boot drive you can startup from?

[MADMAXX]

nope.

[Loa]

Hello,

Two ideas: when you check for CPU/Memory usage in Activity Monitor, make sure you select "All Processes". The screenshot you provided is set to "My Processes".

Also, have you tried removing some of your GPUs? Just try each one on its own. If everything works fine with each card on its own, try two of them (all 3 combinations). Then build from there.

Loa

[OutThere]

Disconnected everything. Still no joy.
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4130/4974514701_16c9cbde9f.jpg

Set it to "All Processes" instead of "My Processes", there might be something else hiding there.

If it's one process that's spiking the cpu usage you might also be able to better see it by setting the update frequency to 'very fast'.

edit: beaten to the punch by Loa!

[MADMAXX]

Looks like ill have to do GPU shuffle at the weekend. I have applecare so I might get that lot involved too. Wonder if the new graphic update had anything to do with it?
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4112/4975229220_c4e7fdde78.jpg

[filmweaver]

I was having the same problems after I updated to 10.6.4 then I removed and reinstalled all my 3rd party software and the problems seemed to go away, go figure.

[MADMAXX]

This is only a recent event and I suspect the last graphics release (that fixed my problems with Aperture) is to blame. Applecare for me this evening.

[DigitalVT]

This is only a recent event and I suspect the last graphics release (that fixed my problems with Aperture) is to blame. Applecare for me this evening.

Maybe try and uninstall/reinstall QT and other media players??