[mythtv-users] S-video/nvidia problems

[Douglas Peale]

On 07/30/2010 04:46 AM, James Crow wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 30, 2010 at 7:17 AM, Jessica Perry Hekman
> <jphekman at arborius.net> wrote:
> <snip>
>> Actually, I am curious: do many of you run Myth on your main
>> workstations, or do you mostly find that a separate setup makes sense?
>> In other words, am I likely to invest time & money in a new graphics
>> card, only to find that I am annoyed at running Myth on my main
>> machine? It is not a particularly powerful machine (AMD Athlon 64 X2
>> Dual-Core Processor, 2GHz, 512KB + 512KB L2 Cache, 1024 MB memory).
>>
>> Jessica
>>
> 
> I run MythFrontend on my main workstation. It is a HP Slimline similar
> to yours. I recently upgraded it to 4GB of RAM because I am running
> WinXP + Oracle in a VM for school. Prior to the RAM upgrade it had 2GB
> and I found it perfectly adequate. I have my system setup as two X
> screens. Screen 0 is my main desktop and screen 1 is my myth screen. I
> rarely use the machine as a standard PC while I am actively using
> Myth, but when I do there is no noticeable impact from the FE. This
> machine does no transcoding or comm flagging and uses VDPAU for video.
> Due to this, MythFrontend takes very little processing power and
> memory. If you wanted to run your MythBackend on this machine as well,
> the backend functions (MySQL for disk I/O and comm flagging for CPU)
> may have a more noticeable impact on performance. If you have a
> separate backend then just the frontend function should have very
> little impact on performance.
> 
> Cheers,
> James

I run both the front end and back end on my desktop. The only time I notice it is when mythfilldatabase runs. The database
thrashes the disk and causes long pauses (10s of seconds) in other applications. This is not quite as flagrant as it once was,
but there is still the occasional hesitation when mythfilldatabase is running.

I also have the system set up so that it will shut itself down if I'm not logged in and the backend is idle, and will wake
itself when myth has something to do. This works better than any windows setup I've used.

This is an i7 920 system with 6 GB of ram, and a single 1.5 TB drive.