[mythtv-users] Just built MythTV, beginner questions

Maarten van den Berg mythtv at ultratux.org
Tue Mar 16 21:01:09 EST 2004


On Tuesday 16 March 2004 23:45, Patrick Reynolds wrote:
> On Tue, 16 Mar 2004, maarten van den Berg wrote:

> I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say "no current CPU."  My Athlon 2400+
> runs at 2GHz and has 256KB of cache.  A P4-EE with hyperthreading is
> probably at least twice as fast on some tasks.

True, it all depends on special routines, like SSE and such, so one 
implementation may be much faster then another. But I think overall the 
Athlons are still up to par with the P4, despite the latter having a much 
higher clockspeed.

> Decoding requires much less CPU than encoding.  Many (but not all)
> compression routines have that property.

Yes, I'm aware of that. Maybe I overestimated how fast an Athlon is.
You have a good point Re: I/O too, if one harddisk has to write two streams 
chances are the head will "thrash". But then again, that happens while just 
booting windows so that's no real showstopper ;-) 

> > It was never my specific goal to build a two-card system, but as I
> > already owned two cards I thought, 'might as well...'
>
> I would use two cards if I could.  (I might even buy a PVR-x50 if I had a
> spare PCI slot for it.)  There are lots of conflicts during prime time, at
> least in the US.  Almost everything worth watching is on between 8 and
> 11:30pm.

As I said, I had so much trouble that I suspect either a PCI conflict (which 
this BIOS cannot resolve: no settings) or one of the cards is botched.
I think I may try to find a resolution that just enables two-card recording. 
But I might also go for a PVR250. A third possibility may(?) be to use a 
frontend. I'm not sure what a frontend can and cannot do. But if it can 
record too, this may and idea.  I doubt it tho, buying another fast system is 
definitely more expensive than a PVR250 card, or even two of 'em.

ATM I have worse problems; in an attempt to do the filldatabase manual import 
and subsequent inserting and tuning of the channels I somehow managed to get 
everything mixed up. I now have a Live TV screen showing Channel "NL 1" but 
the programguide in the OSD tells me it is an entirely different station... 
I fail to comprehend how all settings like channelnumbers work together. How 
do you renumber channels, or is that a no-no since it does exactly this...?
I suppose I have some reading to do (but where?) and I probably also should 
fire up some database client to look into mysqls' tables directly.

Thanks for your help!
Maarten

> --Patrick



More information about the mythtv-users mailing list