[mythtv-users] 2 analog capture cards pushing AMD64/3200 to >=100%?

Chad masterclc at gmail.com
Fri Jun 24 20:11:23 UTC 2005


Hi!

I'm actively playing with Myth, really trying to get it to work
perfectly.  The WAF will grow exponentially then, until that point
though, this is generally considered wasting my time to her.

Anyway...

I've spent quite a bit of time, and a decent amount of money on some
hardware at various times for various reasons.  Once I decided to do
Myth for the house, I figured I needed some decent horsepower for the
BE, ad the FE's could just be minimals.  After reading thread after
thread on this list about HDTV, and realizing I needed it, I came to
the conclusion I needed more power in one of my frontends (the one
playing back the original HD content, the others can play back the
transcoded stuff with their puny specs still).  So I finally decided
to use my backend as my HD frontend also, moving it from the closet to
the entertainment room.

Now, in these last couple of days I've solely been struggling to get
audio working.  Finally, it looks like that's a go.  However, during
this testing, I see the system crawling.  The backend is sucking up
~55% of CPU time (according to top) for a single recording for a
single card.  But I've got 2 cards, and I expect this machine to also
be a FE for HDTV.  Yes, the cards are cheapo analog cards using bttv
drivers (WinTV Go cards).  But I thought if I spent the money on a
decent CPU, I wouldn't have to worry about the amount of cycles
absorbed by the lesser card.

My underlying question in all this:
Should an AMD64 3200+ (cpuinfo says 2330Mhz) with 1MB L2 cache, 1GB
RAM, 200GB SATA 150 on an Asus k8v really be that taxed?

More importantly really, will those specs be able to playback HD content?

Thanks!


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