<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><br><div><div>On 22/02/2009, at 10:46 AM, Aaron Whitehouse wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div>Hello,<br><br>I have just upgraded my HTPC (to one based on the AMD 780G chipset, as<br>mentioned in an earlier email). The weakest link in my new machine is<br>the CPU, which is a Sempron LE-1200 (instead of the 2.4GHz P4 in the old<br>machine). While I thought the Sempron would be faster, it seems to be<br>slightly slower at video encoding/decoding than the P4 was, meaning that<br>my current settings (512x576, 2200 bitrate, MPEG-4, quality between 2<br>and 15, max 3 quality difference between frames, scale bitrate for frame<br>size, HQ encoding and 4MV), which worked fine in Live TV (i.e. one<br>encoding stream, one decoding stream, no DCT encoding, no interlaced<br>motion estimation) on the P4, are slightly too demanding for the new<br>CPU. The new CPU is sitting at around 90+% in Top and is the video is<br>quite jerky. I am guessing that the CPU is hitting 100% on occasion,<br>stalling the playback.<br><br>I have two cards in the machine - a bttv software encoder and a<br>Hauppauge PVR-150 with MPEG-2 hardware encoding. I will probably switch<br>the default card to be the hardware encoder (MPEG-2 takes heaps of room,<br>but I have a new HDD), but I will still need to be able to record one<br>hardware, one software and play one back. Playing MPEG-2 actually seems<br>to take slightly more CPU than playing back MPEG-4, which surprised me.<br><br>So here is my question (after all of that background): I only think that<br>I need to reduce CPU use by about 10%, but I am not sure which settings<br>are the best to change in order to get that. Disabling 4MV or HQ<br>encoding saves a lot, but the picture isn't very good. Tweaking the max<br>and min quality makes some difference, but I'm not sure which to change.<br>What is the best thing for me to change?<br></div></blockquote><br></div><div>HDs are cheap, sub NZ$200 for 1TB ex GST so go MPEG2.</div><div><br></div><div>If you want to upgrade your PVR150 for a PVR 500 let me know as I have some ex demo units from our myPVR demo boxes that i'm not using any more.</div><div><br></div><div>Steve</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><br><div> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div>Steven Ellis - Technical Director<br>OpenMedia Limited<br>email - <a href="mailto:steven@openmedia.co.nz">steven@openmedia.co.nz</a><br>website - <a href="http://www.openmedia.co.nz/">http://www.openmedia.co.nz</a><br></div></div></span> </div><br></body></html>