[mythtv-users] Has anybody put together a three tuner system ?

[Christian Hack]

I agree here with Bruce. Two machines is better for ease of use but
obviously there is the power consumption issues to consider.

My XP2000+ takes around 50% encoding a 640x576 MPEG4 stream (default MythTV
settings) and around 5-10% decoding. Obviously a 2400 won't help heaps in
terms of 3 cards. IDE bandwidth issues etc start to become an issue too.

If you're willing to go down to say 480x576 (about 33% each on my CPU) you
might squeeze it in. Having some headroom (10-15%) is better if something
else happens on the box though.

Perhaps 2 PVR250 cards might be alright in terms of CPU but disregarding
IDE/PCI bandwidth etc.

I'd be interested to see how you go though. Care to be the guinea pig? ;)

CH

> -----Original Message-----
> From: mythtv-users-bounces at snowman.net
> [mailto:mythtv-users-bounces at snowman.net]On Behalf Of Bruce Markey
> Sent: Monday, 2 June 2003 6:14 AM
> To: Discussion about mythtv
> Subject: Re: [mythtv-users] Has anybody put together a three tuner
> system ?
>
>
> cmisip wrote:
> > Is this even possible.  I have an XP2400 athlon and wonder if this is
> > powerful enough for this setup.  I recently was able to free 2 pci
> > slots.
>
> I did run a system with three cards once just to verify
> that the scheduler would work correctly. I would not
> recommend more than two cards per machine simply because
> there is so much resource contention (not just CPU). Two
> 'cheap' machines with two tuners each will give you better
> recordings than a tricked out machine to try to handle
> three. The problem is that you have to set your recording
> parameters low enough that it can handle three if it ever
> happens. Most of the time, you'd have a very expensive
> machine that is mostly dormant putting out low res files.
>
> --  bjm
>
>