[mythtv-users] hardware requirements ....?

Saravanan Subbiah saravanan_subbiah at sbcglobal.net
Tue Jul 29 22:24:25 EDT 2003


In the documentation it is sed that "AMD1800+ system can almost encode
two MPEG-4 video streams and watch one program simultaneously."

I have a P4 1.5 GHz + 384MB RAM machine running Mandrake 9.1 and with
AverStudio TV card. When I record a show in MPEG-4 it takes 100% CPU.

These are my setting

Default - 640x480 - MPEG4 -all default values with High quality video
enabled.
Live - 480 x 480 - RTJpeg - all default values
transcode ( all default values)  - (BTW when is this used ?)


Also when pausing live tv, the processor usage slowly climbs up and at
some point reaches 100 %. When unpause tv, still the processor usage is
100% and I have to quite watching tv for it to go back. Then the memory
also falls back from 100% to about 50 %


Now I am wondering if I will be able to capture reasonably good quality
video and simlutaniously view some recorded progam with my 1.5GHz m.c
without going for a PVR250 ?

Would my harddisk be my bottle neck ? if I do a hdparam -tT I get

/dev/hda:
 Timing buffer-cache reads:   128 MB in  0.92 seconds =139.13 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  64 MB in  2.01 seconds = 31.84 MB/sec

If I build a 2.4 GHz HT Pentium 4 with 512 MB and ATA133 HD, what is the
max. that I can expect it to do ?

thx,
Saravan




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