On Tuesday 15 February 2005 05:01 am, Cory Papenfuss wrote: > On Mon, 14 Feb 2005, Brian Foddy wrote: > > On Monday 14 February 2005 05:08 am, Cory Papenfuss wrote: > >>> Unfortunately, my little-old P3 can just barely do HD with XvMC, > >>> that's why I need it; otherwise I'd try and live without it. > >>> > >>> Brian > >> > >> So a P3 is capable of doing HD if you're using XvMC? I thought > >> that even with XvMC it took a beefy machine. How fast of a P3 are you > >> using? How much of an (NVidia) card is needed to make XvMC go > >> reasonably? > >> > >> Thanks > >> -Cory > > > > I run a P3-1400 Tulatin (slightly more cache than normal). The machine > > has 4 tuner cards, 3-PVR250's and 1 Air2pc. 768MB ram, Nvidia 5600, > > 4 SCSI (10K, 80MB/sec) disks in software raid 0. It is able to record > > all 4 streams and play the HD stream at the same time (frontend/backend). > > CPU load runs about 70-80%. In general, it will not skip frames, but its > > not out of the question. Any fast forward or something will cause about > > 5 seconds of frame skipping while it catches up on its cache. > > OK... that's one rippin' P3 system. I've got a dual 933 PII that > I was maybe hoping to use with HD. Just out of curiosity, how much (%cpu) > is used for: > backend > frontend > X > > .... that determines how well dual CPU will help. My experience has been > pretty good with mythtv on duals. I used an old BP6 (Dual celeron > 300->450) with a software card that was useable at 352x480 capture size. > The capture (mythbackend) itself took 95% of one cpu, but playback was > split between frontend and X and only burned up about 60% of the other. > > -Cory >
Watching / recording NCIS tonight (HD) while recording 3 other pvr250 shows the frontend ran 75-80%, backend 5-8%, X-2%. Xosview shows total CPU 80-85% with some spikes above. Wish I could be more encouraging for your machine. There maybe some threads in the frontend that can help out more. But the machine is certainly getting a workout. Keep in mind tho, you can beef up some P3's. This machine is a IBM Intellistation that only shipped a max 1000Mhz (slot1) from the factory, I added the Tulatin just last year. Brian _______________________________________________ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
