[mythtv-users] EIT Scanner queries

[jack snodgrass]

On 8/28/07, Piers Kittel <mailing at biased.org> wrote:
>
> On 28 Aug 2007, at 01:43, Daniel Kristjansson wrote:
>
> > On Tue, 2007-08-28 at 00:18 +0100, Piers Kittel wrote:
> >> Hi all,
> >>
> >> My backend currently collects program data via the EIT scanner, but
> >> I've got a few queries:
> >>
> >> Is the data collection continuous, or is it like once per hour?
> >
> > Continuous once it starts. In mythtv-setup, under "1. General"
> > on the EIT page you can set the "Backend Idle Before EIT Crawl"
> > which is normally set to 60 seconds. To this time is added a
> > short interval, originally random, but I believe it is based
> > on the cardid in some newer versions. This avoids all the cards
> > starting up the EIT crawl at once and overloading the system.
>
> The reason why I ask this is that I recently came across PowerTOP.  I
> decided to have a look what my server does and how to reduce as much
> power as possible.  I've done everything, and the biggest culprit
> causing potential high electricity usage is both of my video tuners -
> they cause the CPU to wake up from idle.  Each time the CPU changes
> state consumes electricity.  The cards cause the CPU to switch from
> sleep to idle and back to sleep maybe 300 times per second.  I
> suspect it's due to the EIT scanner - someone supplied a patch to
> disable the IR receiver which didn't make any difference.  I don't
> really want to stop using the EIT scanner as I find the data from the
> EIT scanner to be a lot more reliable and a lot more easy to set-up
> than XMLTV.  So I've got another question...  I'm sure you've got a
> good, sensible and reasonable answer for this but... is it *really*
> necessary for the EIT scanner to run continuously?  Why not just
> something like once a hour?  It's not like that the program data
> changes every 5 mins?
>
> Thanks again for your time!
>
> Regards - Piers


would it be possible to make the EIT scanner stuff a separate process / program
that can just be manually run to see what data is out there?

jack