Processor use and hardware encoding

[Subjugator]

I'm terribly sorry if this horse has been beaten to death and then some, but I've got a question that to which I cannot seem to find the answer.

Hardware config:

P4 2.26 GHz processor
i875p motherboard
512 megs PC2700 memory
ATI-Radeon 9600SE (not the best, I know)
120gb ATA-133 HD
80gb ATA-100 HD
WinTV PVR-250 encoding card
Junk sound

Those are the basics on the hardware config. Now here's the question...

When recording a show, should I see pegged solid 100% CPU usage? I thought that it would be offloaded to the PVR-250 and should otherwise have minimal impact on my CPU. Am I doing something stupid or wrong here?

I'm not seeing a setting to confirm which encoder to use...just a decoder.

Any help is appreciated greatly. If I need to RTFM, a direction as to which manual I need to read, or where in the manual I need to read, would be appreciated as well.

Thanks a bunch...

Subbie

[Subjugator]

Sorry for the other mispost. Looks like there's a substantial memory leak in BTV. I had 1.4 gigs of memory use until I rebooted, at which time it dropped back to 142 megs, which is far more acceptable.

Is this a known issue? I'm going to schedule reboots every week or so for the time being, but yeowch! That's a bad leak.

[James]

* shouldn't have to specify a set decoder

* Did you have anything else running? Though I'm sure there's small leaks here and there, I've never seen simply performing a recording cause a consumption of memory go that far out of control. Same deal with the CPU use--you may get occasional tiny blips on the radar, but you shouldn't be much above 4, 5% CPU use on that spec a box as you're recording. Hell, my 800 Mhz box that I have a 250 card in never gets above 9 or 10 even as I watch live TV in the FSGui..

* Is the leak reproducable?

[Subjugator]

The only stuff I have running on that box is AV (which has been disabled, up to and including the filter driver) and the OS.

I'll let it run for another week and see if I can recreate the memory leak. If this is a continuing problem I can try and get something from one of my devs at work that'll intentionally BSOD the box if the developers want to know what's happening at the time of the issue.

Anyway, ultimately, once I rebooted the box, everything went back down to almost nothing and it's stayed there.

Thanks for the help...I'll repost if I can recreate this.

Sub