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Mon Mar 10 15:32:33 UTC 2008


it seems the methods used in compiling some of the standard release packages
took steps to improve compatibility at the cost of performance.  Having only
been involved with this Myth since October of last year, and sticking to
"official releases" from the Ubuntu repositories, I'm not really sure what
to expect in terms of improvement.

Only one of my four frontends have CPU's capable of displaying SD video with
.21, yet were all able to comfortably display similar video from the same
tuner cards with .20.2.  I have tried every reasonable setting in the TV
playback section and while I've been able to improve things, it's not as
good as it was prior to my upgrade.  All of my machines can happily display
video recorded by myth on VLC, while the internal player struggles to keep
up.  On my Pentium D system, I saw 7% cpu usage on VLC, while
mythfrontend.real used about 24% of the cpu to display the exact same file.
On my P4 1.7 ghz frontend, VLC used around 35% cpu, and mythfrontend used
about 70% (and experienced minor skipping).  Doing similar work on a Mac G4
systems (in this case, a 1.33ghz ibook g4), VLC used about 55%, while Myth
used 75%.

So it seems that on every system I can compare, on two diferent OS's, Myth
needs more CPU to do about the same job as VLC in terms of displaying
video.

I'm not the most experienced Linux user, and compiling from source would be
quite a challenge for me (also, I'd have to compile from source on two
different environments, Mac OS X and Ubuntu).  I'd really like to stick with
the packaged releases, but assuming I don't replace/upgrade my 4 frontends,
do I have any hope of the CPU penalty of using myth improving?

I'm seriously considering downgrading to .20.2 again, since it seemed to fit
my hardware better.  If I do "downgrade" what problems can I expect?  I did
backup my database prior to the "upgrade" but I've never actually had to
restore from a backup.  I realize that any recordings made after the upgrade
will be "lost" (they will be present on my system, but not listed, since
they will not be represented in the database backup file).

I don't want to come across as a whiner, and I hope I don't sound
ungrateful.  I really appreciate all the work that goes into Myth, and I
really like using it.  I will eventually have to replace all my hardware
when I eventually make the move to HD, but that's a ways off in the future.


I'd really like to stay with .21 if there is to be a solution to my problems
described above, but I'm not going to put up with poor performance just so I
can use the latest software.

Thanks for reading, any tips or pointers would be appreciated.

Josh

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