On Oct 25, 2005, at 1:40 PM, Brian C. Huffman wrote:
On Tue, 2005-10-25 at 13:05 -0600, Curtis Stanford wrote:
The options you mentioned brought me from about 50% reliability to
more like 95%. Although 6200ch never gives me a problem (I had to add
my DCT2000 model to 6200ch to get it to work), the firewire video
itself is sometimes a little flakey.
Hmmm...DCT2000? I thought that was one of the older boxes that didn't
support firewire out? Or do I have something confused? Either
way, how
did you determine the model # - I'm assuming it's a hexidecimal #.
And
then was it simply adding it into the defines at the top of the
6200ch.c
file? I wish I had the code in front of me so that I could ask the
question more intelligently.
Sorry! I meant DCT6200. The plugreport command shows a thing called
GUID,
which in my case was 0x0014e8fffe1d4773. The first 6 hex digits seem
to be the ID
needed for 6200ch (in my case 0014e8).
I've found using the first two plugctl options above works best for
me with myth set to broadcast and node 1. Sometimes, recordings are
short as I've mentioned in previous messages and sometimes the video/
audio goes choppy after changing channels. Also, LiveTV seems to
screw things up occasionally so that I have to restart the backend.
Do you put these in an init script somewhere? Or create an init
script
that runs before mythbackened? I've also seen someone mention
actually
hardcoding these into a function (presumably in mythtv).
I just made a script that for now I just run by hand after a reboot
or other screw up.
It's not quite bad enough that I want to go back to my PVR-250 but
it's close. If it weren't for HD, I would go back to my PVR-250 in a
minute.
Curtis
Sort of off topic, but what kind of hardware do you have? Is your
backend / frontend the same machine (for the HD)? I have a P4 2GHz w/
512 meg of memory and (I believe) an 845GVB motherboard. I *know*
that
my board does not support hyperthreading (I was being cheap at the
time). I'm also using the Nvidia GeForce4 MX 440. I know that my
motherboard only supports 4X AGP (not 8X). So I don't know if any of
these are my problem....
With preliminary testing (when the firewire is working), I get sort
of a
continual "stop and start" when playing back HD content as if
*something* can't keep up. It doesn't look to me like my CPU is being
killed - I see it at around a load of 2-3 (which is a little higher
than
regular content), but didn't seem terrible. And watching hard drive
activity (which is set to use DMA) also doesn't seem bad at
all...so I'm
not sure if it's a bus or an IRQ issue or what. I'll be happy to just
get the firewire straightened out first and then look into this issue.
Thanks!
Brian
My backend is separate from the frontend. My backend is an Athlon
2300 with some cheap ECS motherboard. I bought a $20 firewire card to
connect to the DCT-6200. I use two 80GB drives with software RAID
striping to get better disk performance. Not sure if I need that or not.
I haven't build a frontend for HD yet so I'm testing with my old
Shuttle which contains a 2.4GHz P4 with hyperthreading and a Nvidia
FX5200 card using DVI output.
If you're using the same machine for front and back, you may have a
problem watching HD LiveTV as it is recording and playing back at the
same time. My front end CPU usage is only 20-25% when watching HD
because the XvMC on the FX5200 is helping out a lot. There's not much
load on the backend as it's just copying stuff from firewire to the
hard drive.
By the way, load is not a good way to measure CPU usage. It's just
showing the average number of jobs in the queue. Try 'top' or
'vmstat'. I usually just type 'vmstat 2' and it spits out a line
every two seconds showing the CPU busy/idle stats on the right side.
Curtis
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