[mythtv-users] How much horespower for frontend?

[Michael Wisniewski]

I was running Myth on FC5 on a P4-about a 1 ghz processor and 512 meg ram.
I was having the same issue as you are with it 'stuttering'.  When I ran
top, the process (myth) was about 20% cpu, and nothing more than 40%.

I upgraded my box to a athalon dual core 64 bit processor and a gig of ram.
The real reason for the upgrade was because the myth box wasn't my open
machine and my hard drive was failling.  Anyways, I decided to go with
Ubuntu and dump FC5.

It was quite the adventure, but in the end, my video doesn't stutter
anymore.  I don't know if it was Fedora that was doing it, the hardware, or
some setting.  But something seemed to help it out.


Good Luck,
Mike


On 9/25/06, MagicITX <magicitx at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 9/25/06, Brian Wood <beww at beww.org> wrote:
> >
> > On Sep 25, 2006, at 5:59 PM, James Pifer wrote:
> >
> > > I've always used a MediaMVP for watching recordings on my TVs and
> > > therefore missed out on the advantage of the frontend. I finally
> > > picked
> > > up an FX5200. It's a PCI model since my machines do not have AGP or
> > > PCIe.
> > >
> > > Anyway, I first installed it in my backend machine which is:
> > > AMD Athlon 1400+ (I believe this is around 1Ghz)
> > > 768 MB Ram
> > > 400+ GB Hard Disk
> > > PVR350 & PVR250
> > > FC5 & myth 0.20
> > >
> > > I immediately noticed some issues, with both the SVideo out and with
> > > connecting the VGA directly to my projector. Besides a brightness
> > > issue,
> > > playback does not play well. I get a lot of stuttering, although no
> > > errors on the frontend while playing it in a terminal window.
> > >
> > > For example, if I put CNN on where stuff constantly scrolls across the
> > > screen, it constantly stutters. It's not smooth at all. I tried
> > > watching
> > > a football game over the weekend and it was unwatchable.
> > >
> > > So I pulled the FX5200 and stuck it in another machine. Exact same
> > > specs
> > > on the machine, except 512 MB RAM, minus the PVR cards, minus
> > > mythbackend and lirc, etc. I got the same results. Swap does not
> > > appear
> > > to be being used at all if I look at 'top'.
> > >
> > > I'm NOT doing any HD. Are these machines not powerful enough for
> > > this? I
> > > have not seen the CPU go above 40%. I'm getting extremely frustrated
> > > now. I would really appreciate it if someone could give me some
> > > input. I
> > > had one person try and give me a hand with the brightness issue in a
> > > previous post, but this performance issue makes the brightness issue
> > > take a backseat.
> > >
> > > Any help or suggestions is appreciated.
> > >
> >
> > Are you trying to de-interlace?, some of those routines might tax
> > that little CPU, remember that the number shown by top is an average
> > and you might be peaking well over that, though 40% seems like it
> > should be OK.
> >
> > I also wonder about the PCI video card, that's a real potential
> > bottleneck.
> >
> > Are you using XvMC? You might need it but I'm not sure how well it
> > might work with a PCI video card.
> > _______________________________________________
> > mythtv-users mailing list
> > mythtv-users at mythtv.org
> > http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
> >
>
> I've run into this problem before.  I never fully understood it but
> don't believe it is a horsepower issue.  As best I can tell it seemed
> to come and go depending on the driver I used for the PVR-250.  You
> might try upgrading the ivtv driver.  If you are using xvmc you might
> try upgrading that driver as well.
>
> --
>
> Tim
> www.magicitx.com
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>



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