[mythtv-users] Cannot watch live television with budget tv-tuner card

[Kevin Kuphal]

Matt Vollmar wrote:

> Kevin Kuphal wrote:
>
>> Søren Pingel Dalsgaard wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>  
>>> I found an old Medion MD5044 tv-tuner card which I popped into my 
>>> mythtv as the only tuner card. I used xawtv to find the 
>>> "frequencies" and configured mythtv accordingly. Watching tv with 
>>> mythtv works (as it "it shows the right picture") but it stall all 
>>> the time and get further and further behind.
>>>  
>>> My system is an (old) AMD Athlon 1.1GHz machine with 1MB memory and 
>>> a brand new (fast?) 250Gb harddisk.
>>>  
>>> I've ordered my pvr 350 but would like to get a feeling of whether I 
>>> should ditch my old tuner card or leave it in.
>>>  
>>> Needless to say, it works just perfect with xawtv which doesn't 
>>> write everything to disk first.
>>
>>
>>
>> The default recording resolutions and bitrates for MythTV are a bit 
>> high.  Try lowering the resolution to something like 352x480 and 
>> record using MPEG-4 at a bitrate of 2200 (1 GB / hr).  You should 
>> find that it works much better and then tweak the LiveTV 
>> bitrates/quality options up from there if it works.  You will also 
>> find that if you don't watch something while recording you can use 
>> higher bitrates for recorded shows using maybe the High Quality 
>> profile since the system will not be playing back at the same time.
>>
>> Kevin
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>
>
> Somehow I doubt this will work so well even with a lower resolution.  
> I have a Celeron 2.4 GHz and it barely copes with Live TV at the 
> settings you list.  If it DOES work, then I have some other problem.  
> I hashed through this pretty thoroughly on the list 2-3 months ago.

That's basically my point.  By default MythTV uses much higher bitrates 
and settings that a lower end system can handle from a recording 
standpoint.  The best practice is to lower the settings to what works 
and then tweak back up to the best that can be done with the given hardware.

Kevin