[mythtv-users] Just built MythTV, beginner questions

[William]

Just for comparison purposes. FIC AU13 motherboard, AThlon 2400+, pvr250 and
Nvidia 5200 FX AGP graphics card, 512 Ram. Here is the output of top while
recording at 720x480 and watching the recording at the same time. I think
with the right hardware his machine will be plenty fast enough.

 20:00:51  up  6:09,  2 users,  load average: 0.01, 0.16, 0.11
83 processes: 82 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states:  cpu    user    nice  system    irq  softirq  iowait    idle
           total    1.5%    0.0%    3.9%   0.0%     0.0%    0.0%   94.4%
Mem:   514600k av,  509360k used,    5240k free,       0k shrd,    1140k
buff
       313300k active,             157284k inactive
Swap: 2048276k av,   18100k used, 2030176k free                  389272k
cached

As you can see, it really pays to use hardware accelerated boards. This
machine was set up using the howto at wilsonet. Just bought a 2nd pvr250 so
I can watch something else while recording. Too many programs all show in
prime time :)

> -----Original Message-----
> From: mythtv-users-bounces at mythtv.org 
> [mailto:mythtv-users-bounces at mythtv.org] On Behalf Of Maarten
> Sent: Saturday, March 20, 2004 5:45 PM
> To: Discussion about mythtv
> Subject: Re: [mythtv-users] Just built MythTV, beginner questions
> 
> 
> On Tuesday 16 March 2004 16:36, Patrick Reynolds wrote:
> > On Sun, 14 Mar 2004, Maarten van den Berg wrote:
> > > On Sunday 14 March 2004 08:49, Dirk Aust wrote:
> > > > Your CPU will hardly manage ONE capture but never 2, I 
> would guess 
> > > > buying a PVR-250, it works well for me, but should try 
> if you can 
> > > > playback at least MPEG1 on your machine.
> 
> > An Athlon 2600+ should do a fine job of capturing one 
> signal at full 
> > resolution.  It probably won't be enough for two.  (My 
> 2400+ is about 
> > 80% doing 640x480 Live TV.)  Even if the CPU has enough power to 
> > encode two MPEG4 streams, you might get bus conflicts or missed 
> > interrupts trying to move that much data around from two sources at 
> > once.
> 
> I have a followup on that.  It may sound strange to you but 
> the figures I get 
> are lower on the CPU usage as what you observed:
> 
> When recording only (at 480x480, mpeg4, bitrate 2200 -which I 
> believe is the 
> default) I get only ~30% CPU usage.  When watching Live TV, 
> that number goes 
> up to 60%.  Therefore, I have to believe that recording two 
> streams should be 
> feasible, using these settings. Haven't tried it yet, though...
> 
> Maarten
> 
> -- 
> Linux: Because rebooting is for adding hardware.
> 
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