[mythtv-users] Cannot watch live television with budget tv-tuner card

[Phill Edwards]

 I found an old Medion MD5044 tv-tuner card which I popped into my mythtv as
> the only tuner card. I used xawtv to find the "frequencies" and configured
> mythtv accordingly. Watching tv with mythtv works (as it "it shows the right
> picture") but it stall all the time and get further and further behind.
>  
> My system is an (old) AMD Athlon 1.1GHz machine with 1MB memory and a brand
> new (fast?) 250Gb harddisk.

1.1 GHz doesn't sound like very much to be doing software encoding of
the TV signal, and simultaneously decoding it back. If you're watching
"live TV" this is what it's doing. Run "top" to see what your CPU
usage is - there's probably no idle CPU and it can't cope.

If you get a PVR350 you'll only be using your CPU for playback so it
may not be a problem then.

Have a look at http://www.mythtv.org/docs/mythtv-HOWTO-3.html#ss3.1 to
see hardware requirements for MythTV.