[mythtv-users] .20 needing more CPU than .19? (My upgrade story)

Justin The Cynical cynical at penguinness.org
Tue Sep 12 20:23:53 EDT 2006


Current frontend/backend machine:

Matsonic MS9337C Pentium 4 2.26GHz, socket 478
512 Meg PC3300
MSI Nvidia 6200 AGP (running at 4x), NVidia driver 8774
SB Live 5.1
LFS based, Kernel 2.6.16.9

Tuners: Avermedia M179 and a PCHD3000

Back Story:

I had the machine in a generic tower case, until the wife told me to get 
a Silverstone case we saw at Fry's (I was going to repaint and modify an 
old gateway desktop case originally, but hey, I'm not going to argue 
with her when she tells me to buy new kit).

When I moved the hardware over to the LC17, I found that the case didn't 
leave much room for cables.  I managed to cram them all in, but the IDE 
ribbon is not very smooth and the power wires run in the same area.  I'm 
not happy about this and I've not had a chance to reroute everything.

I was using a celeron 2 gig CPU at the time.

At this time, the digital signal for KPTV (121 in the Portland Oregon 
metro area) started receiving "WriteAudio: buffer underrun"...  a lot of 
them, making livetv and recordings from that channel unwatchable (I 
didn't have any previous recordings, pre-move case change, to compare it 
to).

So, I picked up the newer Pentium 4.  KPTV started playing back 
normally, and the system as a whole started running much smoother 
(imagine that).

Enter Myth .20


Pulling the code from the release-0-20-fixes (rev 11157), I compiled and 
installed.  While the system as a whole has some great improvements and 
additions, KPTV started getting the audio underruns again.

During my experimentation with this, I tried turning off deinterlacing, 
and the underruns were reduced by a noticeable amount.  And since 
deinterlacing takes CPU, it would seem that the .20 rev needs more CPU.

Also, the themes seem to be missing menus (going into the brows view for 
mythvideo using GNAT crashed X as before), but that's something I can 
fix later.

So, those of you who are running .20, are you noticing higher load and 
CPU usage, or am I running into another issue and just don't know it?


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