MythTV frontend rebuffering problem

[Brandon Beattie]

On Wed, Aug 30, 2006 at 11:00:39AM -0600, Roberto Mello wrote:
> I have a Myth frontend machine where I get frequent "prebuffering" pauses.
> It causes the video -- particularly on Live TV -- to be jerky. I'm only
> doing standard TV, no fancy HD.
> 
> The backend server is an Athlon 1.8 GHz, 512 MiB of RAM. The frontend
> where the problem happens is a Dual P3 with 512 MiB of RAM. Everyone has
> DMA enabled.
> 
> The frontend plays videos from the backend via an NFS share from the
> server, and mplayer has no problems whatsoever with that. The jerkyness
> ONLY happens when playing MythTV-recorded content.
> 
> I've tried a number of things, like running the frontend as root to get
> "realtime priority"; replacing the video card with a fancier Nvidia MX
> 5200; making sure the network card has the right kernel options to have
> full duplex; and a number of other things.
> 
> Nothing seems to do the trick. I have another frontend (a Pentium M 1.7
> laptop) that has no problems playing any type of content. 
> 
> Hints? Questions? is my dual P3 just too slow to handle mythtv streams?
> Can I do something?
> 
> -Roberto

Are you using 100mb/s networking?  Wireless and even 10mb/s can do this.

--Brandon