[mythtv-users] A success story and a few questions.

[tufkal]

Well if you setup the recording profile to use RTJpeg and not mpeg4, 
most of the processing is done on the backend side and the frontend gets 
a little break.  If you switch to MPEG4 the backend uses less CPU but 
the frontend uses more.  It's kind of a balancing act.  The frontend 
uses on average 40% CPU with RTJpeg quality 170 (the default) for live 
TV.  A Celeron 300 should be able to handle it without maxing out the 
CPU usage, and even if it did you could bump the rtjpeg quality down a bit.

Nathan Widmyer wrote:

> How successful is that P3 500?  Do you have processing power to spare 
> or is the processing power almost too little?  I have an older P3 
> Celeron 300Mhz that is collecting dust and I have a bt878 card as well 
> from another box not doing anything.  I want to put a serious box 
> together soon but maybe I can tinker with this old PC and this TV card 
> and I'm wondering how plausible it would be.  Thanks in advance, Nate.
>
> On 8/2/05, *tufkal* <tufkal at gmail.com <mailto:tufkal at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>       have played around with MythTV since 0.15 with mxied success trying
>     new things and learning how it all worked. I recently decided a
>     myth box
>     in my living room would be a good addition, and I had a Pentium III
>     500mhz / 192MB RAM / 10GB HD sitting around to abuse. I am a user of
>     Mandriva (Mandrake) linux, so I installed the backend on my server and
>     added a BT878 card. Using Mandriva 2005 LE and thac's latest RPMs for
>     Myth, it was up and running in 2 minutes flat. Setup the frontend
>     with
>     Mandriva 2005 as well, and everything just worked.
>
>     Now by everything I mean live tv, recordings, transcodes, video and
>     audio quality, and the basics. I will be fumbling throguh getting
>     MythGame, MythMusic, MythVideo, and a few other plugins setup in the
>     next week, but that is not what I am worried about.
>
>     There are a few things I want to accomplish that I am not sure the
>     best
>     way to go about. First of all I have a large wireless network with my
>     neighbors and friends, that I would like to offer streaming TV to.
>     Now I
>     dont have the hardware to run 5 tuner cards and give everyone frontend
>     software. And since there isnt any Windows frontend I know of besides
>     tapping in with DSmyth, I am looking for other options. I noticed
>     that
>     someone with the DSMyth filters can open the ringbuf1.nuv file and see
>     the buffer, but once I change the channel or the file reaches its size
>     limit and starts overwriting itself, dsmyth cant handle it. What
>     is the
>     best way to get a stream I can share on my network?
>
>     The other thing I am looking to do is add a second tuner card so I can
>     record a show while wathcing another live. I've adjusted the various
>     profile settings so that about 40% cpu usage is used per input,
>     but the
>     problem I have run into is when I add the second card, lspci shows it,
>     and the necessary /proc entries show the kernel sees the card, but i
>     only have 1 /dev/video device present. Do i have to mknod it myself?
>
>     Thanks in advance for the help.
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