[mythtv-users] How much horespower for frontend?

[Michael Lynch]

On 9/26/06, James Pifer <jep at obrien-pifer.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-09-26 at 08:13 -0500, Michael Wisniewski wrote:
> > I was running Myth on FC5 on a P4-about a 1 ghz processor and 512 meg
> > ram.  I was having the same issue as you are with it 'stuttering'.
> > When I ran top, the process (myth) was about 20% cpu, and nothing more
> > than 40%.
> >

I have a backend/frontend machine that is a P3 1GHz w/ 256mb ram and
it's been running good for me.  I have 3 capture cards (between 3
backends) - WinTV, Compro Videomate TV Gold+ and a PVR-350.  I am able
to watch live TV and playback all of the recordings without any
problems.  The TV-Out card in this box is an nvidia 5200 based card.

My recording profiles are as follows:

Compro and WinTV both do RTjpeg -
  size:480x480 quality: 250 mp3 sound (one card does 48khz other does 32khz)

PVR-350 does mpeg2:
  size: 720x480  quality: 4500-6000 mpeg2 decoder for sound @ 384kbs

Nvidia xorg snippet:

Section "Device"

    #VideoRam    4096
    # Insert Clocks lines here if appropriate
    Identifier     "VESA Framebuffer"
    Driver         "nvidia"
    Option "TVOutFormat" "COMPOSITE"
    Option "ConnectedMonitor" "TV"
EndSection

Hopefully you can find your 'magic' settings before having to give up
:)  I found my stuttering problems went away after I changed my
recording profiles.  Try various settings in those and see how it
goes.

Another thing I did was to uncheck 'Enable realtime priority threads'
if mythfrontend was not running as root.  (utilities/setup > setup >
tv settings > playback)