[mythtv-users] PIII 450-frontend: too slow?

[Al Bogner]

Am Samstag, 11. März 2006 01:13 schrieb Andrew Lynch:

> True, AMICUS is based on Debian core but to be fair it
> is very lightweight

> You might want to give it a try and see for yourself.

How much space do I need? Maybe i create a small partition to try it out. 
Sometimes this machine should also be used with OO and Firefox.

> I would.  NVidia makes great video chipsets and the
> driver support is excellent in Linux.

It depends on the card. Most cards I have, work great, but I have 2 which 
drive me crazy. One problem is the framebuffer with a GeForce FX 5200 with 
DVI, while another GeForce FX 5200 works fine.

Does 3D influence the perfomance, when watching with mythtv?

> The harddrive and the IDE chipset have to support DMA
> transfers even on a frontend only machine because the
> video is cached on the harddrive prior to display.  If
> DMA is not working it will bog down the system
> severely.

That's clear, but I didn't notice hd-activity in the front-end machine, when 
watching via Ethernet, while I hear a lot of noise of the hds in the 
backend-machine.

> >  Timing buffered disk reads:   36 MB in  3.01
> > seconds =  11.95 MB/sec
> > DMA: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2 udma0 udma1 *udma2 udma3
> > udma4 udma5

> check with
>
> $apt-get install hdparm
> $hdparm /dev/hda   <- your drive here.

I did the tests above with hdparm.

Al