[mythtv-users] What are my realistic expections with pvr250 and P3 600Mhz?

[Kristo Kriechbaum]

On Tue, Jul 06, 2004 at 08:15:27PM -0500, Kelly wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I've been researching and reading threads here...thought the one on Myth 
> pausing and skipping related to me...but, I think my sound is correct....
> 
> When watching live tv, I get this skipping and pausing of video and 
> audio...this is at 480x480.
> 
> I can get to near skip free at 320x480....but, occasionally the picture 
> 'tears'....
> 
> I've got a GeForce4 MX 440 AGP 8x
> P3 600 Mhz Pentium
> Haupauge PVR 250
> Audigy2 sound card
> 256 M RAM
> 
> Gentoo Linux, 2.6.5 kernel with KDE 3.2
> 
> I'm currently just running to my Viewsonic monitor, not to the tv yet. 
> 
> I guess, with this low end of a box...what can I realistically expect? I 
> thought from my early readings, that with the PVR hardware compression...I 
> could get 480x480....but, this just doesn't seem to work on my box. When not 
> doing live tv or recording...I'm only at about 2% cpu usage.....when on live 
> tv or recording...cpu usage jumps to 90%-92% with vertical settings from 480 
> to 320.
>
> Am I barking up a wrong tree here? I was trying to utilize a marginal 
> box...will this not realistically work without a processor in the Athlon 1.2 
> - 2.4 range processor?
> 
> I think I've gotten everything set mostly right...I'm currently trying now to 
> find out if the MythTV bitrates for audio and video have optimal 
> settings...but, nothing found so far.
> 
> Anyway, if someone could let me know if this processor even with the hardware 
> encoding is too slow, it would let me quit trying to trouble shoot...and go 
> buy new hardware right off to bat and junk this....or maybe point me to links 
> to read up on possible tweaks....I'd very much appreciate it.

I have the following setup:
GeForce4 MX 440 AGP 
P3 930 Mhz
2 x AverMedia M179 (same as a pvr 250)
Onboard sound of some sort
512 M ram

Fedora Core 1, kernel 2.4.22-1.2194.nptl_50.rhfc1.at

My recordings are done at 640x480.  When watching a recording, It
generally hovers around 40% cpu usage, maybe plus or minus 10%.  I
would think 600 Mhz would be enough to playback, but I'm not sure as I
don't have one myself :-)

What resolution are you running X at?  In the past I had X running at
a different resolution than my recordings, so it took some extra
"juice" to scale the video appropriately.

good luck,
Kristo