Careful though with the onboard controllers. As Alan writes, it is on a separate bus, but it does not always seem to arbitrate properly with the PCI bus, and in many cases can result in corruption due to lost interrupts or DMAs. For example, combine a AMD Via chipset with a 4-port frame-grabber going full boar on all channels and in less than a day your hard drive will be mush (physically its good, but the filesystem will be totally hosed). With the AMD, a lot of this is because of their hideously slow bus (266 Mhz). If you are going to use multiple cards in a box - i.e., mixed PVR-250, PVR-350, bttv-878, etc., be sure to use a P4 with 800 MHZ FSB (takes 2 memory sticks in different slots to get the full bandwidth). For the most reliable performance, separate video from storage by creating a head with just your video boards, and make it PXE boot to a separate file server. This is a great solution for home users as well because it allows you to create a smaller, quite box for the TV room, keeping the noise in the basement or wherever you put the server.
On Mon, 2005-02-14 at 08:41, Alan Cox wrote: > On Mon, Feb 14, 2005 at 06:40:10AM -0500, Brent Kilgore wrote: > > Ahh PCI ata controller, that's the difference. I'm using the mobo > > controllers. No DMA on the PCI bus would theoretically take double the > > CPU time (once to handle the ata traffic and again to handle the pci > > traffic) the way I understand it (albeit not very well :) ) > > Use the onboard controllers, on most boxes those are a seperate bus to the > PCI bus. > > > limiting factor. CPU isn't the problem. I think my bus is running at > > 66mzh. Probably anything you can buy now will make a difference > > Its normally PCI bus bandwidth (and fairness) as well as meory bandwidth on > low end boxes. Obviously it depends what you are doing. Another trick is to > drop the drives to UDMA0 (either by using a 40pin cable or in software with > hdparm) as that tends to even out the bus usage and leave gaps for the mpeg > engine. > > Alan > > > > ------------------------------------------------------- > SF email is sponsored by - The IT Product Guide > Read honest & candid reviews on hundreds of IT Products from real users. > Discover which products truly live up to the hype. Start reading now. > http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=6595&alloc_id=14396&op=click > _______________________________________________ > ivtv-devel mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ivtv-devel > ------------------------------------------------------- SF email is sponsored by - The IT Product Guide Read honest & candid reviews on hundreds of IT Products from real users. Discover which products truly live up to the hype. Start reading now. http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=6595&alloc_id=14396&op=click _______________________________________________ ivtv-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ivtv-devel
