[mythtv-users] Re: Processor Recommendation - 2 tuner system

Chris cisip at sprintmail.com
Fri Apr 4 01:34:27 UTC 2003


I have a Soyo KT400 Platinum Dragon Ultra motheboard and and amd xp 2400
plus athlon xp with 512 MB pc2700 ddr ram. I have an ati tv wonder (non
ve ) and an ati tv wonder ve.  Also an nvidia geforce3ti200 and sound
blaster live.  I actually built this system with Mythtv in mind.  If you
want a two tuner system you will need a lot of pci slots or at least
have a motherboard where some of the cards you need will be built in
hence freeing pci slots.  I went with the soyo because it has built in
lan, cmi8738 sound card, and an extra ide controller it calls raid (it
is really just software raid but an ide contreller nonetheless).  Each
of the tuner must be connected to a sound card unless you use btaudio to
pull the sound off the tv card.  This will only work on the non ve
version of ati tv wonder.  You are going to need at least one sound
device then for playback on a two tuner system.  It needs to be duplex
capable ( you can record from and playback to at the same time). The SB
Live does a good job at this.  The turtle beach does not (at least not
when I was using it with the then alsa drivers).   I have not checked
the duplex capability of the cmi8738 because I only used it for
recording sound from the ati tv wonder ve before I decided to try and
get btaudio working. The cmi8738 has very weak inputs so I had to use
the microphone input for usable sound when I did use it for mythtv.  Now
I use it as a default sound device for all other multimedia in my pc by
mapping it to dev/dsp.  My SBlive is mapped to /dev/dsp1 and exclusively
used by myth.  My Hollywood plus to dev/dsp2 and btaudio takes /dev/dsp3
to /dev/dsp6.   The onboard lan is important to me because I eventually
want to put together a video network.  The onboard "raid controller" is
handy also because If you are going to build a 2 tuner system, you are
probably going to record a lot of videos and you will need a lot of
storage.  I put a 100g , and a couple of 80g drives in the machine and
connected them to the raid controller and set them up as a single 260
gig drive using LVM and pointed mythtv to this.  My main ide is
connected to a multipartition 80 g harddisk so I can dual boot several
linux distros and Windows XP.  I am using Redhat 8 right now. A creative
infra receiver and remote.  The only problem with the remote was during
install, it failed to create a symlink to the ttSx device which I had to
manually create.  Also there are only a few buttons.  I am using the
nvidia drivers (2 generations behind) but plan on switching to the
newest release. My XF86Config is configured for TV out to my 32 inch
TV.  I see black at the edges as the output is a little smaller than the
dimensions of the tv screen.  I think this is a hardware limitation.  
Also using WindowMaker because it has very good window focus so the
remote works seamlessly with mythtv and I get a second workspace to do
other things and  I can autologin and autostart WindowMaker with
irxevent & and call mythtv automatically.  I am currently using the CVS
version of mythtv because of a bug in Mythtv .8 which caused a program
scheduled for recording to get handed to the encoder twice if the other
tuner is not busy.  This resulted in 2 encoders trying to create one
video file which will error on seek. This is fixed in cvs.  My RH8
system is stable when running myth except recently when I have
occasional sound looping and system crash. It coincided with my use of
btaudio so they could be related. Recording at 480x400 mpeg4 2300 bit
rate with mp3 quality at lowest setting.  There are occasional frame
drops when the two tuners are busy and I am watching another recording. 
This is acceptable quality to me though.  The machine does serve as an
ip masquerading bridging firewall so that is eating cpu cycles.  I wish
this very long post helps you decide what to put in your pc system.  
Let me know if you want me to tell you more.    


On Thu, 2003-04-03 at 15:10, Tom Howard wrote:
> Please sir, tell me more.  I am about to start in on a 2 tuner system 
> myself.  What problems do you have? Using a remote?  KDE? What flavor of 
> linux?  etc...
> 
> Tom
> 
> >Date: 02 Apr 2003 17:53:51 -0500
> >From: Chris <cisip at sprintmail.com>
> >Subject: Re: [mythtv-users] Processor Recommendation
> >
> >
> >I have a 2400 XP 2 tuner system, 512 MB PC2700.  Recording at 480x400. 
> >Works pretty well.  
> 
> 
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