[mythtv-users] CPU load when watching TV

lee lee at yun.yagibdah.de
Sun Dec 13 12:54:46 UTC 2009


On Sat, Dec 12, 2009 at 05:07:18PM -0700, Brian Wood wrote:
> On Saturday 12 December 2009 04:54:09 pm lee wrote:
> > On Sat, Dec 12, 2009 at 04:23:52PM -0700, Brian Wood wrote:
> > 
> > Debian testing, amd64, Phenom 965, GeForce GT 240
> 
> Is this a combined backend/frontend?

yes

Maybe it's normal? It seems to be recording everything I watch and to
mark for commercials. Doing that could explain a higher load than
other programs cause which don't do that.

> > How can I tell if VDPAU is used?
> 
> You need to:
> 
> Have a VDPAU-capable video card (you do)
> 
> Use the latest nVidia drivers

I do

> Select or create a playback profile that uses VDPAU.

Ah! I found this article: http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/VDPAU

Now it seems to be using vdpau: Looks a lot better, CPU load seems to
be lower. But I can't really change the size of the playback window
now: The video doesn't scale with the window size.

Since the fonts used by mythtvfrontend are huge and I couldn't get
them down to a reasonable size, I need to have the window rather large
to be able to use the menues. It covers most of the screen so that I
can't watch TV while doing something without making the window
smaller.

> > Well, I haven't had this problem yet. But mythtvfrontend as well as
> > mythtv-setup make the mouse pointer invisible once it enters the
> > window. Is there a way to change that?
> 
> I'm not sure why you'd want to do that, Myth swallows the mouse cursor 
> intentionally, who wants that on screen when watching TV? Myth is not 
> designed for mouse control, it expects you to use a remote.

It would be very nice to be able to use the menues with the mouse
rather than keyboard only. I haven't set up the remote control yet ---
and I don't exactly see what the use of it would be. And not all TV
cards do have a remote.

> I'd expect Myth to use more CPU than Kaffeine, since it's doing a lot more, 
> like running a database, but I agree pulling that much on 4 cores is too 
> much.
> 
> Top will show you what's using what, start with that.

It showed that kwin was using a lot of CPU ... Other than that, it
only shows top itself as running.

Hm, I think the CPU load is ok now. It's between 3% and 14% now. And I
just found that hiding the mouse pointer is a setting --- I changed
that, and it's useable now :)

Remains the problem of not being able to change the window size while
watching ...


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