Video Stutter In Panther

[powerbookgeek]

Having an irritating problem with my 17" powerbook (1 ghz).

Ever since installing Panther I get stutter on all video playback. I first noticed the problem in DVD player. Every 8-12 seconds the video will freeze for an instant and then start again. I've since noticed the same problem in quicktime player and real player.

I never had the problem when running DVD player Jaguar.

I've tried turning everything else off, running on battery power, setting the display to thousands of colors, etc. etc. Nothing seems to help.

Ideas?

 

[MoparShaha]

Did you upgrade from Jaguar? If so, I'd reformat and reinstall.

 

[Nermal]

Wouldn't an Archive and Install suffice?

 

[Makosuke]

Originally posted by Nermal
Wouldn't an Archive and Install suffice?

Probably, but if there's some background utility that's periodically chewing up processor time and causing the stuttering, doing an Archive (at least with "preserve users" turned on) might just move the problem to the fresh install. Doesn't hurt to try before getting more drastic, though.

Have you tried looking at Activity monitor to see if some process is spiking it's use at those points (or watch the disk transfer graph and see if there are spikes of activity there)? That's the only thing I can think of that would cause a stutter across all applications.

 

[virividox]

maybe you should make sure ur proc is urnning at full capacity, make sure ur energy saving setting is set to highest performance

 

[powerbookgeek]

Good call on the activity viewer. Gave that a try and noticed a recurring process which seemed to jibe with the frequency of the stutter.

It was called "Transport Monitor". I turned it off and now am stutter free.

I guess the next question is, am I going to have to turn this process off, via activity viewer every time I want to watch something? Also, what, exactly am I shutting down and is it going to cause other problems?

Thanks for the ideas folks!

 

[Makosuke]

Originally posted by powerbookgeek
I guess the next question is, am I going to have to turn this process off, via activity viewer every time I want to watch something? Also, what, exactly am I shutting down and is it going to cause other problems?

Well... a quick Google Search makes it look like Transport Monitor has something to do with Palm synching or the like. That being the case... do you have a PDA?

If so, perhaps you're in need of an upgrade for the conduit/sync/whatever software for it. If not, maybe one got installed on your system and is misbehaving (probably constantly looking for a Palm that's not there).

Removing the offending utility should fix the issue, or perhaps something as simple as plugging your cradle/PDA in so it sees something. Sounds like a sloppy bug, though.

Hey, could be worse--I have a background process that periodically launches and chews up a whole one of my two CPUs, and I haven't been able to track down the exact cause yet.