[mythtv-users] What does ATSC poor signal look like? or is the PC not up to it?

[Travis Tabbal]

ATSC got pixelated and loses parts of the video and sound for me when
I had signal issues. The problem is, poor frontend and backend
performance will look similiar. The best soultion is to connect the
tuner to another machine that is better equipped and test it there.
Make sure the tuner and antenna are working properly for live TV and
make sure you are tuning an HD broadcast for the test. That is more
likely to create the errors you are seeing.

Particularly with older drives, try putting another HD in for
recordings only. I use XFS and set it to allocate 512M at a time. That
really helped with backend performance on my system. Even a small disk
will help isolate the problem. Watch the output of 'top' while
recording to see if the system is getting overloaded. With ATSC, you
shouldn't be getting much load on the backend. All it's really doing
is moving the data around, no encoding and such. USB is a little CPU
heavy on some systems, so that could be part of the problem for you.