[mythtv-users] Sluggish response from ATI Remote Wonder II in mythfrontend

[John Winters]

I've got an odd problem with the responsiveness of my ATI Remote Wonder
II when using mythfrontend.

My first attempt at setting up a myth player was using MiniMyth and a
600MHz Mini-ITX motherboard.  That was almost fine, but with one small
problem - certain DVB-T channels gave intermittent sound when played
through the MiniMyth box.  It didn't matter whether it was live or
recorded, anything from BBC1, BBC2, Men and Motors, E4 and a few other
channels had break-up on the sound.  The same channel or recording would
play fine through any of my other computers.  My ATI Remote Wonder II
worked fine with the MiniMyth box.

So, I decided to put the MiniMyth box to one side and substitute a more
powerful computer as a playback system.  The new box has an Athlon
XP2200+ processor and plays all channels and recordings just fine.  It
typically shows about 13% CPU usage during playback (compared to 25% for
the MiniMyth box), so it seems to be significantly less heavily loaded.

The only problem I've had with the new box is the responsiveness of the
remote control.  I moved over my lircd.conf and lircrc files and whilst
the remote control does work, it's awfully sluggish.  Sometimes you can
hold down a button for 5 seconds and it just doesn't register.  I've
re-niced lircd to a nice value of -2 which seems to have effected some
improvement, but it's still nothing like as snappy as it was with the
old, slower box.

I've tried changing the batteries and moving the receiver but it made no
difference.  I didn't expect it to anyway because the output from irw is
fine when mythfrontend isn't running.

Any suggestions what one can do to improve performance?

TIA,
John