[mythtv] Remote Controls / Stability

[Grant Taylor]

> On Friday 04 October 2002 12:51 pm, calvinharrigan@earthlink.net wrote:

>> Also what kind of performance are you guys getting with your
>> setups, please note your cpu/memory size/video/tv
>> card/resolution/codec.  I recently (last night) put together an
>> XP1800, 256 MB Ram, geforce 2 video card, hauppauge wintv, 640x480,
>> rtmjpeg.  The problem is that I am still getting stutters sometimes
>> while watching TV. Playback is fine.

I have a similar system and am also plagued by stutters.  Setting the
resolution to 352x480 eliminates them, for either mpeg4 or rtjpeg.

Yesterday I put in a 7200rpm "WD1200BB" drive (previously I had been
using a slower 5400rpm Maxtor), but this didn't fix the problem.

Today I've discovered that the "interleave" setting is not enabled for
my RAM.  Allegedly you can interleave using only one dimm (why they
don't just do wider loads I dunno), so I'm going to try and turn that
on.  But memory bandwidth seems an unlikely candidate; interleaving
reportedly gives maybe a 10% improvement.

My chipset is a VIA KT266.  There are scattered reports of VIA's PCI
implementation being awful; this article describes a bug that may very
well cause the jitter I've seen - the jitter seems to appear on the
*record* side, which is the side with the most data sloshing over the
bus.  (The jitter is in the recording, not randomly happening at
playback time).

http://www.tecchannel.de/hardware/817/index.html

This article describes some of the register changes to make, but I'm
hoping someone has already bolted these workarounds into the kernel
and I just haven't got them yet.

>> One last note, how stable has mythtv been for you?  I seem to have
>> crashes a little too often, not sure why.  It does behave the same
>> way on two different machines, two different distributions.

I get crashes very occasionally, but then I run an older version.  I
mapped a button to "killall -9 mythfrontend" on my remote; only
occasionally do I have to use it.

--
Grant Taylor - gtaylor@picante.com - http://www.picante.com/~gtaylor/
    Linux Printing Website and HOWTO:  http://www.linuxprinting.org/