I have a dual tuner and would like to know what the minimum processor requirements are to record 2 shows at the same time. Maybe there are other additional HW requirements?

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R7.3: 0.22.20091023-1, Hauppauge PVR-500 (Philips FQ1236A MK4), Gigabyte Gigabyte EG45M-UD2H, E5200 2.4Ghz, 2GB RAM, NVIDIA GEFORCE 256MB

Recording doesn't consume much processing power, playback does. Are you looking at a MBE only or combined FE/BE?

I have a P4 2.4ghz with 512Mb RAM in my MBE with 3 tuners (2 analog, 1 HD) and have not noticed any problems. Many times all 3 tuners are recording...

As a newbie, I will do my best to answer your question: I think what was asked is if I need a front + back end configuration: yes (MBE=?). Is your disk system an IDE-ATA?

I wonder if there is mechanism to gain visibility into processor utilization.

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R7.3: 0.22.20091023-1, Hauppauge PVR-500 (Philips FQ1236A MK4), Gigabyte Gigabyte EG45M-UD2H, E5200 2.4Ghz, 2GB RAM, NVIDIA GEFORCE 256MB

It depends on what you're recording. If you're recording HDTV or digital SD broadcasts, very little processor power is required, all your system is doing is taking the digital stream off of your tuner card and recording it to the hard drive, there's very little processing power involved unless you deliberately set up your system to do something taxing (IIUC it's possible though difficult to set up live transcoding or commercial flagging, which is very taxing on your system...by default, all of that is off, and minimal processor power is used).

On the other hand, if you're recording analog TV, the signal has to be encoded. If your TV-tuner doesn't have a hardware MP2 encoder, then your processor has to do the work of encoding it. Since I personally never record analog TV (my tuner only records digital), I can't speak to how much processor power that takes, but I'm fairly sure that any dual-core processor on the market can handle encoding two streams at once...someone here with some SDTV experience can probably tell you better how much speed you'd need in a single core.

The one other hardware requirement that I'd mention is hard-disk speed...I'm using a 500GB 7200RPM HD for my recordings, which is plenty fast enough to record two HDTV programs simultaneously...it can occasionally get a little rocky when recording two and watching a third, though. In order to do that, you have to have two separate hard drives, one for your OS + swap partitions, and a second that you store your videos on--I find one HD starts to spend too much time seeking back and forth when it has to write two video files, read a third, and read and write swap entries simultaneously. On the other hand, if you're just recording SDTV/analog, I'm pretty sure one hard drive would be fine, since the volume of information that has to be read/written is much, much smaller.

MythTV also offers an option to reserve a certain amount of space for things other than videos...you might want to set aside 20 or 30 GB of empty space (beyond any space you actually use on the partition for non-MythTV files) to help prevent fragmentation in your videos when the disk starts to fill up, since reading, writing and fragmentation might also add up to too much seeking.

One piece of good news that I can give you is that it appears playback will stop before there are any problems created in the recorded files due to limited hard-drive speed, I've crashed out of playback a few times while recording two shows and watching a third with no dire consequences to what was being recorded.

MBE = Master Backend. It's basicly a server where you don't do any viewing of your programs/recordings.

You can see cpu/memory utilization using the command . See for more info.

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Mike
My Hardware Profile

Sorry, (M)BE = (Master) backend, FE = frontend. There could also be SBE, which is Slave backend.

Yes, all my KM (Knoppmyth) systems utilize IDE hard disks. However, my media (videos, music, pictures, and recordings) is stored on SATA drives. I chose the SATA drives to reduce the amount of cabling in the MBE.

I assume that by "dual tuner" you're referring to the PVR-500
mentioned in your sig and that you're using the 500's HW
MPEG2 encoders. If so, processor requirements are minimal. The
PVR-500's hardware MPEG encoding and bus-master DMA transfers
mean that very little CPU horsepower is needed. I would expect
that a 100-200MHz Pentium could easily handle recording two
programs.

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Grant

My guess is that you're dell 4100 is a P3. I have a dell XPS T-500, p3-500mhz, 384MB RAM that I used as a backend with a Hauppauge PVT-250 for a long time. Worked fine -- used about 10% of CPU to record. Plenty of CPU bandwidht left over for a second tuner, though I never tried it. Your 4100 should work fine w/ the PVR-500.

Marc