[mythtv-users] mythtv box not powerful enough?

Travis Tabbal travis at tabbal.net
Mon Jan 18 17:21:43 UTC 2010


On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 9:47 PM, Iain Buchanan <iaindb at netspace.net.au>wrote:

>
> how about if the laptop is just the FE - good enough then?  mpeg-2 only
> since I'm in Australia.
>

It will probably be fine in that case. Just record something and try to play
it back while the backend isn't doing any other recording. mpeg-2 isn't so
hard to play back. Check the logs for the frontend and backend to see if
it's getting I/O starved and "top" or similar to check the CPU use. You need
to figure out what resources are being used up on this machine before you
can really know what's up. It could be that the internal HDD just can't keep
up when it's being asked to seek so much.


>  willing to spend a small amount of money, yes.  Preferably on the
> desktop.  I will need a video card and a hard disk.  Maybe a PCI tuner
> if it turns out to be better on the system than my USB one.
>
> Any comments on this alternative as a FE/BE with a dual core 3GHz?
> http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=775Twins-HDTV
>


The mobo looks fine. Is that for an older P4 type chip? I'm not up to date
on Intel. The onboard video won't help you decode though. ATI is worthless
that way in Myth, though their stuff does display things fine from what I
hear. If you have the CPU and want to re-use it, that might work well for
you. I do mosly NVidia/AMD stuff here, so it's more difficult for me to
compare. But as a data point, I was running mpeg2 here with HD on a AMD
X2-3800 using CPU decoding and it worked well. The only trouble I had was
with the HDD getting too busy with the database and OS on the same disk as
the recordings. I moved the OS to an old IDE drive I had sitting around and
it helped a ton. When decoding a 720p broadcast with CPU I was using about
30%. 1080i with deinterlacing (bob2x) I was using about 70% CPU. I'm in the
US using ATSC, so mpeg2 at a max of about 20Mbps.

Hopefully that helps you look in the right direction.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-users/attachments/20100118/4839c8ec/attachment.htm>


More information about the mythtv-users mailing list