[mythtv-users] pic bad/channels off

[Ray Olszewski]

At 11:33 PM 6/5/2003 -0500, mOjO wrote:
>thanks Jeff!
>
>i looked at the cards in the CARDLIST then set card=63 (ATI TV wonder) and 
>tuner=2 in /etc/modules.conf, rebooted and the channels were good and the 
>color was back... still all is not entirely well.. it seems i cant find a 
>harmonious balance between decent picture and not maxxing out my cpu thus 
>making the audio get choppy... and then sometimes it just freezes... i 
>think i screwed up so much crap in this system first trying to get it to 
>compile and then trying to get it to run right that it may be best for me 
>to clean install and do it right the first time on the next install now 
>that i know how...
>i would think an Athlon XP 1700 would be adequate to handle myth... maybe 
>SuSe 8.2 is just too bloated or i've FUBAR'd it good... im gonna mess with 
>it a little more then maybe try Gentoo, if all else fails its going back 
>to WinXP [insert sinister music here] because the main purpose of that box 
>is to watch DivX movies and play mp3s in my living room, i just thought it 
>would also make a nice capping machine.

Vague descriptions like "a harmonious balance between decent picture and 
not maxxing out my cpu" and "would be adequate to handle myth" are ... 
well, vague.

If you want help with this one, you need to give us some information, such 
as ...

1. What video card and what X server are you using?

2. Whatever the answer to #1, is Myth using xv (xVideo) to diaplay motion 
video? (The alternatives are enormous CPU-cycle hogs.)

3. What resolution have you specified for capture? I've just started 
playing around with this, and today I'm seeing that dropping resolution to 
320x240 reduces CPU use almost beyond belief. (My Cel 1.7 playing "live" TV 
is down around 20% load, using a bt878 card and MPEG4 encoding.)  I haven't 
tested this one yet, but I'm wondering if using an aspect ratio that is not 
4:3 increases the load on the frontend (decoding and displaying) process 
appreciably ... I've always been puzzled as to why mythfrontend uses so 
much more CPU than other decoding applications like xine.

4. How clean is the incoming signal? With every encoding process I've used 
(e.g., mythbackend, vcr/avifile, ffmpeg), a noisy signal takes more CPU 
time to encode than a clean one.

I'd look at these sorts of issues before doing anything drastic like 
changing Linux distro.