[mythtv-users] Newbie questions

Andrew Dodd atd7 at cornell.edu
Wed Feb 4 11:09:59 EST 2004


Quoting "Philippe C. Cattin" <cattin at vision.ee.ethz.ch>:


> > Is it OK to only have one hard disk (100 GB UDMA/100 Western Digital)?
> > Should the hard disk have 7200 rpm?
> 
> just about any harddisk is fast enough.
Exception:  Don't use an external Firewire hard drive.  The Linux SBP2 driver
has some *serious* performance issues.  It's OK for straight reads or straight
writes, but as soon as you do simultaneous reads/writes, kernel CPU usage spikes
to 100% and transfer rate goes down by a magnitude of order.

Windows doesn't seem to be affected as severely in this regard.

Since I moved to an internal 200GB Seagate 7200RPM drive (The $99 CompUSA deal
that came up a few weeks ago), everything is great though.

> > If recording from analog TV, what bitrate do I need to get an MPEG2 that 
> > is almost identical to the source? Thinking of the noisyness of analog 
> > TV, I could think about 6 MBit or something.
> 
> sounds reasonable. When I tried 4Mbit the image looked blocky during 
> fast scene-changes.
Depends on exactly how noisy.
I use 6-7 mbit VBR and the quality is excellent for most channels, but two
channels in my area are just so noisy that the encoder chokes on them no matter
what the bitrate.  If you're using analog cable, you should be absolutely fine
though.  My problems are when recording weak OTA channels.



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