[mythtv-users] Has anybody put together a three tuner system

[Brian Foddy]

On my dual P2-450,
Certainly its a tough stretch.  I run 3 tuners (2 401's and a PVR250)
but I don't have the CPU to do everything and watch a 4th show
without significant skips.  Recording 3 with no watching
however is suprisingly useable.   I use 640x240 
resolution with rtjpeg @200 settings.  I don't encode audio, and I can't 
deinterlace at all on a P2 machine.  I have 3 HDs in the system (2 80MB 
SCSI and an IDE, all 3 in an Linear Raid config, most of the space is
on 1 18GB  10k drive).

In summary tho, by adding a 2nd cpu to a system you go a long
way towards it.  I haven't tried putting all this in a 
dual P3-1000 machine I also have, its doing other work.  But
the added CPU power may make a lot of difference.

Question:  Any thoughts on how I can see if its PCI bandwidth,
HD limits, or CPU?  When my machine starts skipping bad, the 
CPU load actually goes down.  Is that because the frame buffers
are full and and new ones are skipped, or possibly PCI or HD
limitations.  The answer may influence how I upgrade my system
to a permanent solution.


Brian


On Tue, 10 Jun 2003, Robert Kulagowski wrote:

>  
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> The only possible three or more tuner combination I can think of
> that's even in the realm of "reasonable" is going to involve at least
> one (or more) PVR-250 cards, just to cut down on the PCI bandwidth
> issues.  Getting super fancy with multiple PCI busses, or a 64bit PCI
> bus and cards (not that I believe that you can get a 64bit capture
> card cheaply) and fast processors is going to end up costing more
> than just getting two or more cheaper boxes.
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