[mythtv-users] Cannot watch live television with budget tv-tuner card

[Michael J. Lynch]

Kevin Kuphal wrote:

> Matt Vollmar wrote:
>
>> Kevin Kuphal wrote:
>>
>>> Søren Pingel Dalsgaard wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hi,
>>>>  
>>>> I found an old Medion MD5044 tv-tuner card which I popped into my 
>>>> mythtv as the only tuner card. I used xawtv to find the 
>>>> "frequencies" and configured mythtv accordingly. Watching tv with 
>>>> mythtv works (as it "it shows the right picture") but it stall all 
>>>> the time and get further and further behind.
>>>>  
>>>> My system is an (old) AMD Athlon 1.1GHz machine with 1MB memory and 
>>>> a brand new (fast?) 250Gb harddisk.
>>>>  
>>>> I've ordered my pvr 350 but would like to get a feeling of whether 
>>>> I should ditch my old tuner card or leave it in.
>>>>  
>>>> Needless to say, it works just perfect with xawtv which doesn't 
>>>> write everything to disk first.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> The default recording resolutions and bitrates for MythTV are a bit 
>>> high.  Try lowering the resolution to something like 352x480 and 
>>> record using MPEG-4 at a bitrate of 2200 (1 GB / hr).  You should 
>>> find that it works much better and then tweak the LiveTV 
>>> bitrates/quality options up from there if it works.  You will also 
>>> find that if you don't watch something while recording you can use 
>>> higher bitrates for recorded shows using maybe the High Quality 
>>> profile since the system will not be playing back at the same time.
>>>
>>> Kevin
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>
>>
>>
>> Somehow I doubt this will work so well even with a lower resolution.  
>> I have a Celeron 2.4 GHz and it barely copes with Live TV at the 
>> settings you list.  If it DOES work, then I have some other problem.  
>> I hashed through this pretty thoroughly on the list 2-3 months ago.
>
>
> That's basically my point.  By default MythTV uses much higher 
> bitrates and settings that a lower end system can handle from a 
> recording standpoint.  The best practice is to lower the settings to 
> what works and then tweak back up to the best that can be done with 
> the given hardware.
>
> Kevin
>
I use a P3 733 system and to watch "LiveTV" I had to lower the resolution, switch to RTJPEG, lower the bitrate, and switch to
uncompressed audio.  Start with uncompressed audio, then lower
your RJTPEG quality a bit.  After that adjust your resolution down
until you have some CPU idle time.  Then you can tweak any of them
you want.  I takes a while to get a combination that still gives
reasonable quality but with patience it can be done.