[mythtv-users] Compelling reasons to go 64bit?

[Alex Malinovich]

On Wed, 2006-11-29 at 12:56 -0800, Yeechang Lee wrote:
> Chris Ribe <chrisribe at gmail.com> says:
> > I'm considering switching my myth box to x86_64 when I upgrade to
> > FC6.  Is there any compelling reason to do this yet?  It has a 3Ghz
> > P4 which handles HD playback quite nicely with hyper threading
> > turned on.
--snip--
> ATrpms SRPM to boost the ringbuffer size. However, as far as I can
> see, there is no reason *not* to make the move either if you are
> comfortable with the process; that is, there is no disadvantage with
> going 64-bit (except with things like lack of a 64-bit Flash plugin
> for Web browsers, which of course has nothing to do with MythTV and in
> any case is irrelevant for me), and--perhaps--advantages to gain.

I would second this. I've been running pure 64-bit on my primary desktop
PC for over a year now with no problems. A year ago there were some
limitations on what would and wouldn't work, but nowadays I have better
luck getting apps to work on my pure 64-bit system than I do on my
32-bit system.

One statistic that I can share from my limited and not very scientific
personal speed testing is this:

I tested doing a FLAC encode from a raw WAV file on both 32-bit and
64-bit on the same machine. The machine had a clean install of Debian
32-bit and Debian 64-bit with nothing installed but the base packages
and the FLAC encoder and associated dependencies.

Encoding using the 32-bit FLAC encoder on an AMD64 machine took 57
seconds.

Encoding using the 64-bit FLAC encoder on the same AMD64 machine took 32
seconds.

That was enough to get me sold on it. Now, can you expect that much of
an improvement in video encoding? I don't know. I haven't tested it. But
at the very least I'm pretty darned sure that the performance certainly
wouldn't be WORSE in 64-bit mode, so, if you're comfortable with setting
up a system from scratch, why not give it a shot?

-- 
Alex Malinovich
Support Free Software, delete your Windows partition TODAY!
Encrypted mail preferred. You can get my public key from any of the
pgp.net keyservers. Key ID: A6D24837
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