[mythtv-users] Highest number of simultaneous streams recorded?

Graham TerMarsch mythtv at howlingfrog.com
Fri Oct 14 01:33:16 EDT 2005


On Thursday 13 October 2005 4:14 pm, Anand_Inala at dell.com wrote:
> What is the most number of streams anyone on the list has simultaneously
> recorded without problem?  I assume recording 2 streams while watching a
> third has been done, but has it been done with no loss in quality, etc?
> How about 3 streams?  HD + an analog stream?  I'd like to get an idea of
> what my limitations and potentials are before I get too deep in my
> current project.

I just dropped a PVR-150 into my MythTV machine here, to go along-side of the 
two PVR-250s that were in it already.  Several times a week we've got all 
three of them recording, while -also- watching something that we'd previously 
recorded.

Funnier yet, I -know- that my box is a bit underpowered; its a 1GHz Athlon, 
640MB RAM, runs on a single 200GB WD driver on ATA-100, and uses an Nvidia 
Geforce4 MX 4000 board for the TV-Out.  NOT the beefiest of boxes, but I (and 
my wife) have been quite happy with it.

We did have a few ivtv driver related issues when I put the PVR-150 in it, but 
I'm hoping that ivtv-0.4.0 resolved the drop-outs we were getting (if not, 
I'm sure I'll be in the dog house again).

Quality wise, all three boards are recording at the default MythTV settings; I 
can't remember going in and twiddling them when I installed the machine.

If you're planning on recording multiple streams, do yourself the favour and 
get a board that does hardware MPEG encoding.  CPU usage on this machine is 
~5% when recording 1 stream.  I haven't checked on it when we're recording 3 
streams and watching a recording, but it hasn't choked on us yet. :)

-- 
Graham TerMarsch


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