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

[Nick]

On 6/24/05, Chad <masterclc at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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?

What video card are you using? HDTV is MPEG2 format which a lot of
video cards should provide acceleration for, but looking at the specs,
if you have a suitable video card, I can't see why you should have
problems viewing HDTV. Viewing HDTV and recording 2 shows on the
analogue tuners might be a problem though - you may want to consider
in the future moving to a PVR-500 or a couple of PVR-150s/250s which
offer MPEG2 capture and very little performance overhead on the rest
of the system.

Nick