[mythtv-users] 2 analog capture cards pushing AMD64/3200 to
>=100%?
Poul Petersen
petersp at mail.alleft.com
Fri Jun 24 20:46:09 UTC 2005
> 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.
Hmm. That does seem a little high for a frame grabber, but
then it all depends on what settings you are using. I've got a
XP 2200+ with two WinTV Radio cards (and an Air2PC card incidentally).
I have the bttv cards set to capture 480x480 Mpeg4 and when they
capture they use about 38% of the cpu each.
Personally, I'd ditch the bttv cards and get some flavor
of PVR. I had weird crashes that seemed to be the result of
starting simultaneous bttv recordings on a single backend.
When I "stripped" my bttv cards across backends, the problem
lessened, but every now and then I would be recording three
shows at once (so at least two on one of the backends) and it
would blow up (not everytime mind you - and if I rebooted the
machines regularly it would further lessen the problem) But since
I added a PVR250, my machine has been up for months. I'll
probably buy a PVR500 or two shortly and throw away my WinTV
cards...
-poul
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