[mythtv-users] How about a benchmark utility... MythBench?

[Henk Poley]

> Van: Joseph H. Fry <joe at thefrys.com>
> 
> I am the furthest thing from a coder... but I could definitely see a
> place for this in the mythtv package... and it would make it easier to
> determine optimal settings.

Yup, some kind off automatic configuration for the recording settings would
be nice. I think I wouldn't mind if it would take a long time to let it
tweak everything. As long as it's shorter than ~8 hrs.

> True this might not take into account crappy input signals, tv tuners,
> sound cards or their related drivers... however this would allow people
> to determine if their hardware is up to par and allow users to compare
> systems and determine if their mobo/processor/ram/output video/output
> audio/ect. Combo will provide good results.

Uhm, if you want to use this data for automatic settings, then you should
use the actual sources. Since it wouldn't help a lot if it tweaked your
machine for recording 'DVD quality' video, but you use (analog) cable.
Plus, how would you want to distribute these test files (bittorrent, ed2k)?
People would need big pipes.

> I'm sure one of you developer types could expand upon this idea...

I don't think I'd be doing any of the programming work. But I would like to
work this out a little bit. If time allows. 

> Basically it would be nice to have a way to quantify the capability of a
> system to handle the IO intensive tasks.  And this would be virtually
> impossible unless everyone were using the exact same external source
> unless, as in my solution everyone would use the exact same internal
> source.

Okay, I get your point, you want to be able to compare system components
across multiple systems. But you could as wel do some more 'synthetic'
benchmarks. Which would then give you some advice á la Sisoft Sandra for
MS-Windows (enable DMA, upgrade RAM, etc.), before commencing with the
'real' test.

	Henk Poley <><