[mythtv-users] Prebuffering pause - how I fixed mine

[Joe Carter]

Seen as Prebuffering pauses are a relatively common fault I
thought I let the list know how I fixed mine.

Initial setup was a 1Ghz celeron all analogue backend and
an athlon 2700+ frontend connected via ethernet.
SuSE 9.3 base - using myth 0.18.1 rpm install.

My problems here were a slow disk and using the wrong filesystem.
The celeron was a free cast off and so only had a 20Gb drive
and I let SuSE use the default of ReiserFS.
Would occasionally stutter - could be cured, most of the time,
by reducing the capture screen size.
A faster 200Gb drive with XFS seemed to fix this - and provide
and more sensible amount of storage.

I then upgraded to a AverMedia 771 DVB-T card.
Recognised out of the box by SuSE - nice.
After a bit of faff got it working fine.

After 20 mins watching BBC1 it would stutter with prebuffering pauses. Grrr.
Tweaks various things - no luck.

Then I realised my hub (another freebie cast off) is just a 10Mbps one.
Directly link the two machines (100Mb cards) and voila, it works.

So bog standard ethernet can't cope with fast streams from sources like
the BBC. Superb picture btw :-)

Hope this helps someone,

Joe