[mythtv-users] Performance

[Peter Hutnick]

Ray Olszewski said:
> At 07:30 PM 8/3/2003 -0600, Peter Hutnick wrote:
>>The CPU is a Celeron 1.3GHz.  Seems like this should be ample for
>> watching TV.
>
> ... you may be underestimating the CPU load of watching "live" TV.

You nailed it here.

>  Also, since you don't say what video card and X driver you are
>  using, it is unclear if XVideo is running properly, another source of
> CPU  load problems.

The card is a "Radeon R200 QL [Radeon 8500 LE]" according to /proc/pci. 
The associated kernel module is just listed as "radeon" and is whatever
comes with Red Hat 9.

(KDE) Control Center->Information->X-Server says Server
Information->Supported Extensions->XVideo (and MIT-SUNDRY-NONSTANDARD,
thank goodness!)

mythtv says "Using XV port 61"

I don't know how to check for "running properly" any further.  How can I
check?

> So check this by running "top"

Top is reporting ~8% idle on average with the default settings (mjpeg at
170 and mp3 at 7 IIRC).  Dropping them to 120 and 5 helped, but didn't
resolve it altogether.  Dropping to 100 and leaving mp3 at 5 seems to have
resolved it.

Thanks for the advice, Ray, you hit the nail on the head.

Does anyone have any suggestions that might reduce the amount of fiddling
I have to do to get the best results I can?  Things like "forget MPEG-4"
or "Use raw audio if you have lots of disk." are what I am looking for. 
But I just made those two things up, so let me know if they are right or
wrong ;-)

Thanks again for all the help, guys!

-Peter