Hardware recommendations for MythTV/FreeBSD

[Steven S.]

> Simply modify dvd_ntsc_profile in cxm.c, recompile, and reload the module.
> Some suggested bitrate values are:
>
> 	{ 0, 9000000, 9520000 }, /* 1 hour on 4.7 GB media */
> 	{ 0, 4000000, 4520000 }, /* 4 hours on 8.54 GB media */
>

Cool, I need to do some coding, i want to try using sysctl's for setting 
these rather than hardcoding it in the module.


excellent points below but in my case my machine is headless so no X 
server, has plenty of free ram and writes out to a hardware raid array.
It just records then I playback on other devices. I use a simple shell 
script which freevo calls. All it does is this:

/usr/local/bin/buffer < /dev/cxm0 > $1 &

where $1 is the path passed from freevo.

I only tried using buffer after a previous recommendation on the list. It 
might have helped or not.. i've no evidence either way.

I guess my next step is try to determine if the hardware raid might be 
slowing things down just enough. I'll redirect the output to the system 
disk and see what I get.


> It indicates the application isn't consuming the data fast enough.
> In the case of mplayer some options are:
>
>  a) Better video card.  Personally I like the ATI Radeon cards.
>
>  b) Better Xserver (i.e. XFree86 4.4) which supports using the
>     video card hardware for things like colorspace conversion
>     and MPEG motion compensation.  This is of course assuming
>     your video card has hardware for those sorts of things.
>
>  c) Faster processor.
>
>  d) More memory (only if your machine is actually swapping).
>
>  e) Modify mplayer to implement application real time buffering
>     using METEORSSIGNAL (basically copy libmpdemux/tvi_bsdbt848.c
>     to libmpdemux/tvi_bsdcxm.c and start hacking) or try increasing
>     CXM_SG_BUFFERS.  This only helps if the problem is due to large
>     bursts of data ... it will not help if your machine is simply
>     not fast enough to keep up with the average data rate.
>
>  f) Enable MPlayer's frame drop option (more of a workaround
>     than a solution).
>
> BTW using:
>
>  $ cat /dev/cxm0 | mplayer -
>
> causes the machine to do more work than:
>
>  $ mplayer /dev/cxm0
>