I just picked up a fry's linspire box to use as the MythTV. I got everything loaded up fine with a PVR-150 card and R5A22.

The problem seems to be when I watch live tv or a recorded session the front end CPU usage spikes up to over 80% (I SSH end and used top to take a look) but if I just let it record in the background the CPU usage is almost nonexistent. I am thinking it might be a video driver issue. So with that in mind is the SiS Real256E 2D/3D Graphics/SIS UniVGA3 usable with MythTV? If it isnt anybody else have any thoughts to what might be the prob?

_________________
R5.50

The reason the CPU doesn't spike during recording is that the PVR150 has a MPEG2 encoder on board, so all the encoding is done there. Without knowing more about your CPU (type, speed, etc) this is just a guess, but an 80% usage is indicitive of MPEG2 *decoding* being done by the CPU rather than the card. You might want to check the Knoppmyth wiki regarding hardware selections to see if you can find any references to hardware similar to yours.

It looks like my hunch was right the onboard vid card was the bottle neck. I dug up an old NVidia Vid card I had laying around and the CPU Usage dropped to around 16%.

so except for the onboard Vid chewing up clock cycles this works out of the box for R5A22

Sempron 2400+
ECS 741GX-M2 - Socket 462
640 MB Ram
OnBoard Nic - SiS 900
OnBoard Sound - RealTek
Asus V7700 Video Card
PVR-150

Now it is time to tweak the config a bit

_________________
R5.50