[mythtv-users] Really confused about the backend server

[Ray Olszewski]

At 11:25 AM 5/27/2003 -0500, Daniel Jimenez wrote:
>So basically, all the video is streamed over Ethernet to the front end?
>
>Is this choppy? Does the backend box do encoding and decoding, or does
>the front end do decoding? I realize 100 mbps is a lot of bandwidth...
>
>Also, the front-end machine basically just needs TV out and a nic?
[old stuff deleted]

The frontend does the decoding. So 100 Mbps is plenty (even the 50-60 Mbps 
that 100 Mbps NICs really deliver, typically, is plenty) to transfer the 
encoded file (on the order of 10-20 MB/minute, corresponding roughly to 1-3 
Mbps).

The frontend needs a powerful enough CPU to do the decoding. I've been 
surprised to see that my system (Celeron 1.7 GHz), which decodes standard 
MPEG-4 files (encoded using avfile or mencoder, played back with xine) 
using about 5% of CPU, uses almost 30% when decoding Myth captures ... so 
the demands on the frontend CPU may be a bit more than you anticipate.

Not sure why this difference is occurring, or even if my experience it typical.