[mythtv-users] just watching TV is jumpy

[Andrew Dodd]

Quoting Michael <mailinglists at fuzzymonkey.org>:

> I excitedly installed everything for MythTV over the past few days.  now
> that I am finally done I've found that I cannot even watch TV because it
> is jumpy, jittery, and the video falls behind the audio.
> 
> I have no problems watching TV using xawtv, TV Time, mplayer, etc.
> 
> I have a 1Ghz Athlon, 512MB RAM, 2.4 Kernel (Gentoo), DMA verified on
> HD, with Haupauge WinTV Go V4L.
> 
> Again, this is just trying to watch TV.
> 
> What can I do?

What video display card?

If NVidia, are you using the binary drivers or the stock X drivers?

If you're using the stock X drivers, upgrade to the binary ones ASAP.

Also, a 1 GHz machine is borderline for software encoding/decoding at the same
time.  You might need to drop your resolution down a bit.  xawtv, tvtime, etc.
don't use any CPU because they simply dump raw video across the PCI bus directly
to your vid card's framebuffer, MythTV is inherently designed to record, encode,
then decode.  Less efficient for watching live TV with no timeshift, but
necessary for the functionality of timeshifting and recording, which is what
sets MythTV apart from the rest.

Worst case you may need to invest in a hardware MPEG encoder.  I have a
Hauppauge WinTV-PVR 350 and my machine barely breaks a sweat when watching live
TV, thanks to a combination of 0 CPU needed for encoding, and my video card
(GeForce 4 Ti) handling motion compensation for decoding of MPEG2.  Except for
the fact that I'm using a hardware encoder, my system is basically the same as
yours.  (Athlon 1.1, 512M RAM)