[mythtv-users] ATI TV Wonder VE Users

[Mike Wohlgemuth]

Albert Santoni wrote:

>Steven, you'll find there's several users on the mailing list who experience
>chops during LiveTV, but I think most of us are having different problems
>manifesting themselves with the same symptoms...
>  
>
Count me as one of the people that is having problems.

One thing that helps for me is to hit pause for a bit (less than a 
second even).  After that, video is much smoother for me.  This makes me 
think that maybe there is some buffer somewhere that needs increasing on 
my system, but I don't understand the code enough to know if this guess 
is anything but wild speculation.

I also know that my system is very sensitive to context switches, so 
that might be part of your problem as well.  If I access mythweb, there 
is a 50% chance that the video will stutter.  There's a very noticeable 
stutter when mythfilldatabase runs as well.  Going over my system with a 
fine tooth comb and killing everything that wasn't necessary helped 
reduce these sorts of stutters, although I haven't been able to totally 
eliminate them.  I somewhat suspect that the nforce network drivers are 
a culprit on some of the stuttering.  If you are using nvnet, you 
definitely want 'options nvnet optimization=1'  in your 
/etc/modules.conf, or any network I/O will hammer your CPU.

I guess I have 2 questions about it:

1.  Are there any buffers within MythTV that it would make sense to 
increase in an attempt to fix this?

2.  Is the PVR-250 less likely to have these problems?  I know that, 
being a hardware encoder it won't have as many problems staying in sync 
as the software encoders, but it's not clear to me from my symptoms that 
it's an issue on the backend at all for me.  Obviously I'd benefit from 
reduced CPU usage, but CPU usage doesn't seem to be my problem right now.

Mike