Hammering the CPU

[MonsterMaxx]

I'm new to BTV, did the trial, wandered around a little longer, came back and bought.

It's running. Appears normal.

Watching live TV it's hammering the CPU, 90-100%
W/ the autothrottling fans in the machine it's getting real loud in here w/ the CPU getting hammered.

XP2600, running at 333 w/ 1GB of ram on XP SP1
I've got that crappy PVR350 card.
Mch has a nVid dual VGA out, one to display, one to a converter to S-Vid.
I have a 5200 on order so I can eliminate the converter box. BTV in overlay mode so I can get it on the TV.

FYI: playing ripped DVDs either in VOB mode or encoded into AVI w/ PowerDVD5 it uses ~20% cpu.

So what's up with BTV pegging out the processor? Is this normal? Something misconfigured?

[sloanja]

I wouldn't think so, since you are viewing live tv through the PVR-350 card.

What is going on, is that Snapstream is recording your TV to your hard drive in a buffer, which takes 10-15 percent of your CPU time regardless of live tv or not. After that, its got to take what is in the buffer and display it on your screen with an On Screen Display (the OSD). I'd think that process would take at least 20 percent by itself. Depending on what mpeg2 decoder you are using, it could take even more processor time depending on the options you have, such as deinterlacing, smoothing the picture, etc. That decoder still falls under the process list of BTV3, as it is a spawned child process. I think what is killing it is the overlay portion, having it in overlay is like the safemode of BTV3. It will display, but not as efficently as the default. (I might be wrong about the overlay, though.)

[btvfreak]

As other people have suggested in this forum, if you don't care about the Timeshifting feature, then just disable it and you should see a significant improvement in your CPU usage.

From the BTV menu go to Settings > Recording Settings > Always Timeshifting > Disabled

[MonsterMaxx]

Ahh, I'll try that tonight, thanks.

On the overlay...

What I want is:
TV output on one monitor
OSD on the other, if I had my druthers it wouldn't hide itself either
This of course requires a dual head video card, which I have. nVidia in this case.

How should I set it up for this

[Terminal]

Something strange is going on, from my sig you can see my system has considerably less horsepower and my system runs at about 40-50% CPU when watching live TV

[MonsterMaxx]

Well, I just fired it up,

'Always Timeshifting' is disabled already.

[Leaf]

Are you using the latest drivers and codec from
http://www.hauppauge.com/html/sw_pvr_250.htm

did ya try the reg hack on the codec?

[MonsterMaxx]

When I went to download them, I already had the most recent.

Downloaded them anyway, into a new directory, installed them.

Set it to record (see about this dropped frame thing.) It has the CPU at 100% and flatlines it.

[MonsterMaxx]

Interesting little tidbit

I played a recording (.mpg) w/ BTV and it's using 90+% CPU, vid is poor at best.
Played the same file with PowerDVD5 and getting 40-50% CPU and far far better playback quality

Even more interesting playing an AVI (ripped DVD, encoded at max quality) w/ PDVD I'm getting the normal 20-30% cpu

[MonsterHTPC]

have you looked in your task manager to see which task is at what percent?

what decoder are you using? the Intervideo one?

[Leaf]

If you haven't yet go to monsters setting up BTV it's the second link under his name. Scroll down almost at the bottom is a very simple reg hack. my cpu usage dropped by 40 %.