[mythtv-users] cpu usage question / recording setting recommendations

Brian Lalor blalor at bravo5.org
Tue Jun 17 21:37:22 EDT 2003


Well, I've finally got everything configured!  I'm very impressed, but 
I'm having difficulties getting my recording settings down.  I've got an 
Athlon XP 1700+, 512MB RAM, a 120GB Hitachi drive, Matrox G400 and a 
WinTV-dbx.  I'm recording the audio via btaudio and using alsa for my 
on-board via82xx sound card.  I initially used the default recording 
settings (RTJPEG) which produced very good quality recording as well as 
live TV, but *huge* honkin' files.  Now I've switched to MPEG4.  First I 
tried the default settings, but on playback, the recording was jerky.  I 
believe the load was also extremely high.  I didn't check system load 
when playing that show.  Then I went to 1800 and found it better, but 
CPU usage was extremely high (>95% used by mythbackend).  I'm now 
recording something at 2000 and 320x480 resolution.  CPU usage for 
mythbackend alone is about 90% (overall system load ATM of 
0.83/0.91/0.96).  I can't watch any recordings, however, because the 
playback and sound are jerky.

I would have figured that my system would have no problem recording and 
decoding an MPEG4 stream at the same time, but it seems that I'm having 
difficulty just encoding to an MPEG4 stream at the default settings. 
I've compiled Myth 0.9.1 on my box and I explicitly specified my 
processor (--cpu=athlon).  Can someone point me in the right direction?

Thanks,
B

-- 
    __   ____
   / /  / __/ Brian Lalor
  / _ \/__ \  blalor at bravo5.org
/_.__/____/  http://bravo5.org/


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