[mythtv-users] liveTV sucking up CPU cycles?

[Brad DerManouelian]

On Nov 9, 2008, at 5:03 PM, Jason wrote:

>>> LiveTV uses 2 - 2.5 times the CPU cycles of playback.  I have no  
>>> idea
>>> why....
>>
>> Have you checked that your LiveTV recording profile and whatever your
>> other recording profile is using is exactly the same?
>
> I believe I've seen the same issue in the past, but haven't  
> investigated
> things well to this point.  (I've usually been OK with it, because  
> it's
> helped us avoid watching baseball games when the in-laws are  
> visiting.)
>
> I'm in the process of testing a HDPVR on a separate system and  
> noticed that
> I can't reliably watch a problem via live-tv, but I can from the  
> recordings.
> Watching an in-progress recording is fine, too, so if I really need  
> to watch
> something now, I'll start it via mythweb and watch it from the  
> recordings.
>
> It would be nice to track down the issue, though, as playing LiveTV  
> vs a
> recording (in progress or not) should behave the same.  Now that  
> I've got a
> somewhat workable test system, I can help with some testing.

If both the LiveTV and Default (or whatever you're using) recording  
profile are set exactly the same, watching LiveTV uses extra resources:
1. It's recording the file and playing it back which may be difficult  
in some file systems
2. It's inserting information into recordedseek while it's recording

I may have forgotten other things, but these are the obvious  
differences. Again - assuming LiveTV profile is set the same as your  
recording profile. I keep repeating that because I ran into this issue  
a while back and it turned out that I had LiveTV quality set to the  
max on my PVR-350 and Default set to substantially lower quality.

-Brad