[linux-dvb] Re: Budget card recommendations?

[Roberto Ragusa <mail@robertoragusa.it>]

On Sat, 4 Sep 2004 15:53:42 +0200
Martin Emrich <emme@emmes-world.de> wrote:

> Are there any caveats with any of these cards (e.g. I heard rumors that the 
> B2C2-Based cards are big performance hogs because of many interrupts,...)

I don't know your definition of "performance hogs" or what kind of expectations
you have about a DVB card, but I can successfully run 5 istances of mplayer
showing 5 different TV channels (from the same transponder) at the same time
with a Skystar2.

On my rather cheap hardware (XP2400+, SiS746, 512MiB PC333, FX5200) the CPU
is 90% busy, which is not too bad if you consider it's decompressing 5
MPEG streams with broadcast resolution and bitrate.

Decompressing one MPEG stream with mplayer takes 15-20% of CPU and if you
just save the data to the disk (cat >show.ts /dev/dvb/adapter0/dvr0)
the CPU load is about 0% and I estimate the board generates
about 10 interrupts/s.

-- 
   Roberto Ragusa    mail at robertoragusa.it