[mythtv-users] Cumulative frontend frame drops

[Gert van der Knokke]

Hi,

Having aquired my long awaited PVR250 and beefing up the backend server 
from Dual P3-550 to a P4 (1.5GHz 512Mb DDR) this mostly due to the lack 
of performance/stability of the IDE ports on the dual machine, but ok it 
was supposed to be used as a SCSI system..

I now notice the following:

I run the setup with two frontend machines: a Celeron 400 (Intel 
Dotstation 128Mb) and an Asus Pundit (2.4 GHz Celeron 256 Mb) but both 
systems behave similar during live-tv.
If I fire up 'Watch TV' the viewing is smooth and flawless, picture 
quality has improved greatly over the 'old' BT878 card I used before. 
But when I switch channels framedrops occur (best to be seen in the 
'ticker' lines of CNN and such) when I press ESC and select 'Watch TV'  
again the viewing runs smooth again. Furthermore, the more I change the 
channels the worse the framedropping gets. Anyone else experiencing this ?
With the BT878 card I never had this.

Some info:

MythTV 0.14 on all systems PVR250 with IVTV 0.1.9 on the backend. 
Backend is running FC1 and both frontends run Knoppmyth upgraded to 0.14

Live-TV buffer is on dedicated IDE drive with xfs (tried ReiserFS too as 
EXT3)
System load on the backend server is minimal (< 10%)

The Celeron of the Dotstation can just manage the stream (even tried 
480x576 instead of 720x576), but the Pundit should have no problems at 
all but still both behave similar.
The network consists of 100Mb CAT5

As I said, exiting Live-TV and re-entering immediately solves it.

Gert