Koolu as MythTV frontend suggestions

[Ted Roche]

Bill McGonigle wrote:
> On Jan 30, 2008, at 08:12, Ted Roche wrote:
> 
>> top is showing mythfrontend.re at ~95% CPU pretty consistently
> 
> That sounds like CPU-based decoding.  The koolu is an AMD Geode, which 
> has a hardware MPEG-2 decoder, IIRC.

Agreed. I need to do a lot of tuning here. This is one of those 
situations where I installed MythTV with various cards, distros and 
options a dozen times or so until I started to get video and then I 
stopped. Then, after a week or two of going down cellar to confirm I was 
getting files, I salvaged a half-working ThinkPad to play the role of 
frontend ("No, but it plays one on TV, arr arr."). Now, I'll need to go 
back and dissect what I've got and maybe turn off some of the more 
insane choices I made in the attempt to get it to work. A clean and 
documented install even, now that the proof-of-concept has been running 
for 15 months.

I'm suspecting some poor choices in transcoding, too.

> And then you should see, I'm guessing, 20% CPU or so. If I were Koolu 
> I'd have this all pre-configured ... if it's well known that you can 
> apt-get install mythtv to get a working SD frontend, it ought to double 
> their sales!  Maybe *they'd* want to figure this out for you.

You would think. I suspect Koolu is a shoestrings start-up. They have a 
forums.koolu.org community site set up, but spammers munged it pretty 
badly, and right now there are four read-only posts up there. One of 
them is a sample xorg.conf and notes on installing MythTV. But both 
could use some refining.

  > Me, I'm off to send a bugreport to the kernel list about my new MythTV
> box which can't seem to use any xATA DVD drives. :(

Ouch.