[mythtv-users] MythTV questions...

[John Sutherland]

I'm fairly sure its the drive.. I've had the drive in numerous machines in
the past, and its always been slow.. Even in machines where I get 40M/sec
on other drives.. And DMA is turned on.. along with 32bit mode, etc...

I think its a known problem on that drive.. I usually just keep it around
for backup.. I'll endup buying a new drive anyways (40G is too small for
Myth anyways).. I was using it only cause I have nothing else right now :)
I really would liek to avoid buying another mahcine though, so I'm hoping
the channel switching problems will go away with a new drive..

-- 
--John

papenfuss at juneau.me.vt.edu said:
> 	I'm assuming that with hdparm you verified that you're getting DMA
> enabled?  (e.g. 'hdparm -d1 /dev/hda')... Then the 'hdparm /dev/hda' to
> verify
>  using_dma    =  1 (on)
>
> 	Even with that, 2 MB/s sounds awfully slow.  Perhaps your
> chipset/kernel driver is somehow DMA broken.  Look for odities in 'dmesg'
> That's might account for 30 sec channel changes if the card also has DMA
> problems.
>
> 	Don't know... but I can say that I didn't have issues with mythtv on a
> bttw software encoding on a dual celeron 300->450... it would
> encode/decode at
> up to 352x480 rtjpeg.  The PII-400 should have plenty of poop on an ivtv
> card.... maybe 40% utilization on a full-blown DVD (720x480) stream max.
>
>  -Cory
>
>  On Wed, 7 Apr 2004, John Sutherland wrote:
>
>> Hi guys/gals..
>>
>> I just setup and got working a basic mythtv box, and I have some
>> questions..
>>
>> First, a little about the system it its on.. I'm using this box more of
>> a
>> proof of concept for myself.. It is a Pentium II 400Mhz, 128M, PVR-350,
>> and a "broken" 40G drive.. By "broken" I mean that I can not get more
>> than
>> 2M/sec rates from hdparm -t.. The drive works, its just slow... I'm
>> using
>> the 350's TV-Out, and for a distrib, Gentoo...
>>
>> Now for the questions...
>>
>> 1) I've noticed that channel changing is ---slow---.. Nearly 30 secs to
>> change the channel... I'm assuming its either the slow drive, or the
>> slow
>> processor.. Which do you think it is?
>>
>> 2) What is the difference between the frontend and the backend? I
>> haven't
>> seen a good description of what both of them really do... Does the
>> backend
>> do the storage?? If I move my backend to another (much faster) machine,
>> would that solve the channel changing slowness??
>>
>> 3) When using the TV-out on the 350, how's it really work? Does it read
>> the input from the tuner, then store it to disk, then read it, and send
>> it
>> to the tv-out? (kinda related to the previous question I guess)
>>
>> 4) Has anyone coded up a burner plugin? To burn DVD's, VCD's from
>> recorded
>> video? Or even music? If not, I might consider writing one..
>>
>> Thanks guys/gals!
>>
>> --John
>>
>
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