[mythtv-users] A quick look at Mythbuntu 8.10

[James Crow]

On Mon, 2008-11-03 at 14:34 -0500, Colin McGregor wrote:
> I had a quick look at Mythbuntu 8.10 yesterday, and overall I liked
> what I saw, but ...
> 
> For background I am currently running Knoppmyth, and I am somewhat
> concerned by the sluggish update cycle, and I am somewhat interested
> to see if the grass really is greener on the other side. So, after
> shutting down my Knoppmyth box yesterday I disconnected my 500 GB SATA
> drive and connected a 40 GB EIDE drive. Then I ran the Mythbuntu disk.
> 
> There was an issue at the first boot with the machine not detecting my
> pcHDTV-5500 tuner card. This card was detected after I  installed
> updates and rebooted.
> 
> After the install everything was a bit nicer / slicker than I was used
> to on Knoppmyth. I like the concept of the easily done incremental
> upgrades. Two things have given me pause though. In the small, near
> trivial was the screen save is on by default (which I don't want). Far
> more serious was watching OTA HDTV, which would stutter every few
> seconds, something I find unacceptable.
> 
> Are there any obvious / easy performance tweaks I should be looking at
> with Mythbuntu? I have installed the proprietary nVidia drivers (which
> I assumed would be a real help...). The box is an Athlon 64 3200+ with
> 1.5 GB of RAM, an nVidia 7200 PCIExpress card and three tuner cards
> (the pcHDTV-5500, a PVR-150 and a PVR-350).
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> Colin McGregor

Did you look at top during OTA HD playback? I am using Mythbuntu 8.10 on
two machines (Athlon 64x2 5000+, 2.6 GHz and Geforce 8400gs cards) and
they easily handle HD mpeg2. If I watch with top (or htop) I see that
mythfrontend consumes about 60% and X about 15% so there is room to
spare. I am able to view SD content on my desktop (Athlon x2 3800+
2.0GHz) at 1680x1050 with the nv driver without problem. I don't think I
have tried OTA HD on it.

I also switched from KnoppMyth to Mythbuntu and found the screen saver a
bit odd at first. It does not activate while watching a recording (video
files, etc) though and so it has never been a problem for me.

Cheers,
James