I use 2 boxes one dedicated for recording and the other for playing. The box who plays is connected over the LAN using NFS. 100 MB lan using switches in stead of hubs is recommended for this kind of setup
> Thorsten Pferdekämper wrote: > >>Hi, >>whenever I watch a video while my freevo box is recording something, the >> video >>appears rather choppy. This would be ok for me if top told me that there >> is >>no idle time left, but there is about 20% idle all the time. I also can >> not >>really imagine that the disk is the problem. It does not change at all >> when I >>give the mplayer command a -cache 100000. >>So I have played around with my BIOS settings. Perhaps it is a little bit >>better now after optimizing some timing settings, but it stays being a >> little >>bit choppy. >> >>I have also played around with the nice values for mplayer and mencoder. >> I >>have mencoder with nice -12 and mplayer with -5. I have also tried to >> give >>mplayer a lower nice that mencoder. This way, watching the videos were >> not >>choppy any more, but I had some frame drops sometimes. So I kept mencoder >>with the lower nice, because it is more important for me to have nice >>recordings. >> >>So, does anyone have an idea how to make mplayer use my systems >> ressources? >>Alternatively: How can I check where the bottleneck is? >> >>Regards, >> Thorsten >> >> > I had a runin with this too, and also I prioritized mencoder. the reason > is simply that lowest nice value gets preemptive precedence over the > other application and mencoder requires cputime every frame you record. > If mplayer has lowest nice value, mencoder will buffer some frames and > encode when cputime is available, however these buffers can only hold so > much. > The only sollution I've found is a compromise and give both applications > a farily low nice value. I used -10 for a period, however you should be > confident that you have sufficient resources (i.e. at least 20% spare > cpu time when recording/playing) and accept that although better, > sometimes frames will drop anyway (so dont use mplayer while recording > anything important... ) > oh.. and last sollution would be to get an ivtv based capture card. > since they do encoding in hardware, the cpu is left largly untouched... > (1-2% on my 700Mhz Athlon recording 720x576 mpeg2.. ) > > My $0.02 > - Styx > > > > > ------------------------------------------------------- > This SF.Net email is sponsored by: NEC IT Guy Games. > Get your fingers limbered up and give it your best shot. 4 great events, 4 > opportunities to win big! Highest score wins.NEC IT Guy Games. Play to > win an NEC 61 plasma display. Visit http://www.necitguy.com/?r > _______________________________________________ > Freevo-users mailing list > Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users > > > > -- > This message has been scanned for viruses and > dangerous content by OpenProtect(http://www.openprotect.com), and is > believed to be clean. > > -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by OpenProtect(http://www.openprotect.com), and is believed to be clean. ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: NEC IT Guy Games. Get your fingers limbered up and give it your best shot. 4 great events, 4 opportunities to win big! Highest score wins.NEC IT Guy Games. Play to win an NEC 61 plasma display. Visit http://www.necitguy.com/?r _______________________________________________ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
