[mythtv-users] Methods to avoid transcoding on slow frontend?

[Brian Wood]

Matthew Hager wrote:
> Hello all, I'm having a problem with stuttering HD playback on my mythtv 
> system.
> 
> First off, I need to let you know that I'm running an ATSC tuner card 
> (air2pc rev0.02) with a MX5200 AGP on a rig with a Pentium III 1.0Ghz CPU 
> and 512MB of RAM.  Currently this is a combined FE/BE.  I'm splitting these 
> very soon, which brings me to my main question.

> I realize that my situation is screaming for gratuitous amounts of 
> transcoding to MPEG4 (which at 2200kbps works great with this proc), but I 
> wanted to see if there was any way to avoid lengthy transcoding times for 
> transient (ie not going to keep long term) items.  Plus the transcode 
> option kinda nixes any possibility of Live HD programs?

I guess nobody needs to tell you that a faster CPU is the best solution
to your situation.

I'm a little surprised you are having such good luck with MPEG4, as you
can't even get any help from XvMC for that.

For an SD frontend only though, I think it should work fine, especially
with XvMC. You also taking the database and backend load. I'd make sure
it wasn't doing much of anything else.

(For a reference point, Dell stopped including a hardware mpeg decoder
on laptops with DVD-ROM drives at the time their CPUs hit 600 Mhz.
PIIIs, and that was with pretty well optimized software decoder code.)

As for transcoding HD, you didn't mention what you plan to use for a
B/E, your F/E won't have to "touch" the HD if the B/E does that job, and
if the transcode negatively effects the other backend chores you can
always just nice it until it doesn't, if you're not in too much of a hurry.

beww