[mythtv-users] MythShyte: One unhappy customer

[Gavin Haslett]

For the record, I just want to add that I've been using a less-capable
system than your 1Ghz machine for some time. I have an Athlon 800 with
768MB of RAM (though I ran 256MB for a while). To be honest I didn't see
any problems with my setup except for some random failures of
Mythbackend (that were fixed with 0.18.1).

Now, note that I'm using hardware encoding with a PVR-250 rather than
relying on a bt-type chip. I originally had a bt878 card but decided
before I even installed MythTV that if I was going to do this I was
going to do it right. Besides, my wife and kids have to use the thing!

Anyway... you might find that just switching to a better capture card
like a PVR-250 or its ilk might work well. Now, I realize you might not
be willing to part with a little cash for the card but believe me if you
want to make this work then it's worth it. Also, make sure you do some
hard-drive tuning to get the max performance out of the hard drives
you're using... I had problems with stuttering occasionally until I got
down-and-dirty with hdparm to fix some of the HD problems. Now I have a
bootup script that runs the hdparm parameters that I found worked best
with video.

I also found good-quality hard drives with a nice 8Mb buffer helped no
end :)

Hope this helps!

Gavin


On Wed, 2005-07-20 at 06:11 +0930, antec wrote:
> thanks, John also had this to point out. I can now understand why the system 
> paused and the overheads involved.
> 
> thanks.
>