[mythtv-users] High CPU load on playback

[Ian Morgan]

On Mon, 25 Oct 2004, Henry Chin wrote:

> My mythtv system is working greate with the one exception to high cpu load
> when playing back a recording.  When I watch livetv the cpu load for X is
> about 10%.  When watching a recording cpu load for X is about 60% with
> occasional prebuffering pause.  I had previously fixed a problem with
> livetv whereby setting the defaultcolordepth for X to use 16 instead of 24
> in the XF86Config-4 file.  Reason for this was my SiS650 video driver was
> not properly supporting 24. I would assume the same color depth would
> apply independent of livetv or playback, but for some reason the cpu load
> is still high on playback.  Is there a special setting for playback that
> is different from livetv?

I am having similar symptoms, but I do not believe the cause is anything to
do with colour depth.

In my case, both LiveTV and recordings playback chew off about 60%-80% load
on my HT 3.0GHz P4 box, with NVidia Tv-out.

Strangely, this did not happen for about about 2 months after setting up the
box. Then one day I noticed the strange high load during playback. After
rebooting the box, the problem went away, but resurfaced after a day or two.
Since then, rebooting makes no difference, and I always suffer high load
during playback.

This is using 0.16 release. The load seems limited to 2 threads of
mythfrontend, but I have no idea what those threads are doing. Myth is not
configured to apply any filters to the playback.

Playing the same NUV with mplayer does NOT generate anywhere near the same
load, no matter whether using x11, xv (<5%), gl, gl2 (~10-12%) outputs.

Regards,
Ian Morgan

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