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

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.

 

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

 

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.

 

reboot with everything disconnected

 

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.

 

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

 

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

 

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!

 

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.

 

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