> From: Ronda Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >> How does EyeTV handle this 'program creep'? >> When you schedule a program in EyeTV does it record it at the time >> you set or does it just know when the show has begun and ended? > > In EyeTV > Preferences > Recording You can 'Extend Recordings' > I have mine set for: > Start: 2 mins before Scheduled > Finish: 15 mins after > "EyeTV will extend the recording by the amount selected if it can do > so without conflicting with another scheduled recording."
I have set EyeTV to the same settings as well. For shows scheduled very late at night (Enterprise or Farscape) I manually schedule a good 30 minutes before and after just in case as well. :-) >> What sort of performance hit might one notice while EyeTV is >> recording in the background of a DP450 Power Mac that is already >> slightly busy? > > I use a Mac Mini exclusively for EyeTV nothing else. > I would assume that the busier your Power Mac is the performance > would drop in EyeTV recording. > That's only my opinion, it may not be correct. Recording using a digital TV tuner actually only places low loads on your CPU as you are effectively just downloading the MPEG-2 stream in digital format straight from the broadcaster onto your disk. No digitisation/compression/encoding or de-coding is required. For a few months a few years back we successfully used an old single CPU 450MHz G4 PowerMac with only 256MBs of RAM to record digital TV using our EyeTV 400, and it only struggled if I tried to play back 2 recordings simultaneously. I'd be surprised if you had any trouble doing so with a dual 450MHz G4 and a bit more RAM. Recording using an analog TV tuner can however place high loads on your CPU if the Tuner doesn't have a built-in encoding engine as the analog signal has to be digitised and compressed into your preferred digital video format like MPEG-2 or Quicktime etc. For example if I want to record an analog channel using the analog tuner in our EyeTV Hybrid on our 1.8GHz G5 iMac, I have to quit every other app and stop any exports from EyeTV before the G5 has enough oomph to record and compress a single analog TV channel at the highest quality setting (MPEG-2 at 768x576 if I remember correctly) without dropping frames. However, the very same iMac has no problems recording 3 digital TV channels simultaneously (using the digital tuners inside 2 EyeTV Hybrids and the old EyeTV 400) while exporting H.264 versions of other shows and with half a dozen other apps running. I should also mention that playing any video (either a live broadcast or a previously recorded show) does also exercise the CPU as it decodes the MPEG-2 file for display on your screen hence playing back 3 live TV streams on the iMac can sometimes drop frames if the Mac is busy doing other things. -Mart -------------------------------------- Martin Hill email: mart "at" ozmac.com homepages: http://mart.ozmac.com Mb: 0417-967-969 hm: (08)9314-5242
