[mythtv] backend plus frontend (success!!!)

[Jeff_Mitchell at accessbusinessgroup.com]

Michael-

I rarely use the live tv feature of Myth (It's mainly used to record
Charmed for the wife (Don't ask me -- she seems to like it, and at least
it's not soaps), as I've been extremely busy working on our house), but it
seems to work pretty well.  When I first installed Myth, I did some
screwing around with the settings, using CPU usage during Live TV as a
worst case scenario.  The settings mentioned below seem to pretty much peg
the processor, but this machine is just being used as a Myth box at the
moment.  I do get a bit of strange behavior when watching Live TV, however:

I hit the 'Live TV' button in mythfrontend, and after a slight pause, I get
a screengrab of the channel.  Then I get a little stuttering (5-10 seconds
at most), which I assume is due to the initial caching of recorded
information, etc.  I get the same stuttering when I change channels (of
course -- in my view, this is the same as restarting Live TV, with a
different channel), but as long as I stay on the same channel, I don't get
any skips.  Shuttling through the buffer takes a half second or so, but the
audio's in sync, and things look good.

I'm not sure what you mean by "weaker machine."  If you mean mine is
weaker, you're probably right.  I've seen a lot of people using much more
powerful machines, which probably alleviate some of the (extremely minor)
issues I mentioned above.  I certainly didn't do any tweaking to get Myth
to perform this way, other than playing with settings.txt (copies available
upon request.)  If you mean, "How can I get these results on a PIII-450", I
have no idea.  These settings are what I'd consider the upper limit for
this machine, although someone with more knowledge of how rtjpeg and MPEG4
compare might be able to squeeze a bit more out of it.  Basically, if you
have less grunt (by this I mean total grunt -- a hardware-based encoder
definitely adds to total grunt, and you can probably get away with a much
more lightweight processor) than this, you're going to have to expect lower
quality.

If you want more detailed information about my setup, let me know.  I'd be
happy to answer any questions I can.

-Jeff


                                                                                                                                                    
                    Michael Stearne                                                                                                                 
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                    02/05/2003 12:50 PM                                                                                                             
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Jeff_Mitchell at accessbusinessgroup.com wrote:
> I've currently got Myth running on a desktop (modest PIII-600, records
> 480x360, MPEG4 with the default settings, except I tweaked the bitrate to
> about 1GB/hr),
>
Are you able to record and watch live tv?  Or is this simply recording
that you are doing (not pause, etc.)?  How can you get these results on
a weaker machine?

Thanks,
Michael


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