Joshua Lutes wrote: >> Unless you're streaming video that's of higher quality than that >> captured by your tuner card, I bet your problem isn't guts at all but >> network-related. Maybe you need a bigger buffer or fatter pipe. >> > > My roommates don't have issues with using their laptops -- and since > YouTube is buffered I didn't think that this would be the root cause.
Ok, so network seems fine. > > I'm not sure what kind of video card I have, but since everything is > going out through the PVR-350 tuner card, I assumed that the video > card wouldn't even matter. Now that you mention it, IIRC myth has the ability to use the decoder in the pvr-35 (or one/some of those hauppage cards anyway), which would explain myth being fine and non-myth not being fine. > I think I read somewhere that the PVR-350 > only outputs MPEG-2 or something like that and I wonder if 1.7 GHz > isn't enough to encode that on the fly. I would think that it would be. But then, I wouldn't think streaming video would be any harder (since it's typically low resolution). But it may be that the pvr-350 hardware decoding is in use, or your video card is helping out via Xv, and that the same things aren't happening when playing back streaming video in a web browser. > Though now that I think about > it I thought that the PVR-350 also had encoder/decoder capabilities, > so maybe that wouldn't matter. Hm. It has a hardware encoder, that outputs mpeg2 as you mentioned. It may also be the model that has a decoder which some programs, e.g. myth, can take advantage of for decoding mpeg2 (which streaming video is not because it's not a very compressing codec - because it's so old). But it's not automatic, the program has to use it explicitly. I think you should figure out whether your myth is using the pvr-350 to help decode video, and find out what video card you have and look at the playback settings in myth to see if it's using Xv or what. Then we can make an educated guess about what is going on and whether you need more cpu to play streaming video. You might try downloading a streaming video file as others discussed and playing it both with mplayer or vlc, and with myth. Mplayer will let you play around with Xv etc., though I'm not sure about the pvr-350 decoding support. -- Hans Fugal ; http://hans.fugal.net There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself. -- Johann Sebastian Bach /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
