[mythtvnz] CPU required for Freeview HD

[Michael Dilger]

I know I'm late weighing in on this thread.   I've been busy with other 
things.

I'm running an Athlon64 3200+, I think it's 2.0 GHz.  It is underclocked 
(because I have some freakishly sensitive memory).

I get an extremely watchable system, all the channels work visibly 
flawlessly... except TV3 which stutters.  This includes the Kordia HD 
loop which was also working flawlessly.   However, major caveats:
1) I'm not using MythTV, I'm using mplayer-svn
2) I'm using "-fs -vo xv -mc 5 -vf pp=fd -vfm ffmpeg -lavdopts 
skiploopfilter=all:fast -framedrop"  ... so it's probably not perfect I 
just cannot see the difference.
3) When initially tuning a channel, mplayer has syncing-up issues, 
sometimes jams up and crashes... I can mostly avoid these with a quick 
pause and unpause.
4) mplayer still often crashes in decode_audio, but only when initially 
getting the video up and running.

With MythTV, including Paul Kendall's modified version, all the channels 
stutter (run 1 second, pause 1 second).  So I'm not using MythTV at the 
moment.

Point being... the H.264 decompression can be run fast enough on this 
slower hardware.. under the right conditions.   The additional overhead 
of recording to disk while decoding... well that's probably what bogs 
things down.

I am using gentoo (preempt) so everything is compiled and optimised for 
my processor.  Thus, it is a bit faster than pre-built systems like 
Mythbuntu.

-Mike