[mythtv-users] mythtv box not powerful enough?

Travis Tabbal travis at tabbal.net
Tue Jan 19 16:07:50 UTC 2010


On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 5:14 PM, Iain Buchanan <iaindb at netspace.net.au>wrote:

>
> > 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.
>
> I will, eventually!  I don't have a separate backend yet!
>
>
That's OK, just make sure the backend doesn't have any recordings scheduled.
I'm referring to the mythbackend process here, it doesn't need to be a
seperate machine. The idea is to keep the backend process from eating much
for resources so you can see if the machine is capable of just playback
without anything else going on and where the bottleneck is. You could also
try with just mplayer or VLC as well, with myth totally disabled if you
like. I would think that CPU should be able to decode MPEG2 HD streams just
fine. When I was doing testing for this stuff I used an SSH session to run
top and check logs while I played videos so I could see what was going on.



> yes, an LGA 775.  I would purchase a PCIe, maybe an 8800 GT or something
> (haven't looked into that yet) so the ATI will be unused!
>
>
That's a good idea as well.


>
> That's not a bad idea, I could purchase a second HD and take out the
> DVD.  What would take the most load from a FE/BE - the database or the
> recordings?  I could even put NAS on a g/bit lan (hmmmm) anyhoo that's
> down the line!
>


The recordings tend to be large streaming reads/writes while the database is
going to be more random I/O. The random I/O is probably "harder" on the
drives because of the seeking. If you have one, an SSD should help with
that, though it's not necessary. I ran my OS and database on an ancient 40G
IDE drive just fine. A large, slow drive for the recordings like the "green"
5400/5900 RPM drives is fine for recordings. All my FEs get to the
recordings and videos over gigabit ethernet from my OpenSolaris server via
NFS using 5400 RPM drives. My backend is even running in a VM on that box.
It's all working great.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-users/attachments/20100119/20dab377/attachment.htm>


More information about the mythtv-users mailing list