Recently I switched my media server from ext4 on LVM to ZFS. This has mostly been a great success, however I noticed a big problem with MythTV. In the past it would take 1-2sec to start playing video, now it would take 5-60sec. Ouch!
In this post I’ll describe the trouble-shooting techniques I applied, along with all the various things I found and fixed along the way. If you just want to see the solution you can scroll to the end.
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Comments Off on Fixing a MythTV performance problem
I have a large collection of DVDs and I live in Australia. Because of history this means most of them are in ‘PAL’ format. This means they tend to be about 4% faster than they should be, resulting shorter playing times and higher pitched voices and music.
I’m a bit of a purist. This bothers me enough that I must fix it! What follows is a somewhat lengthy explanation of how film/video works, followed by instructions on how to use my fix-pal-speedup script.
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Update: See WebDL
Just wrote a simple downloader script for SBS’s website. The SBS Player interface is all in flash and is very hard to use on my TV, so this script lets me download the stuff I’m interested in and play it however/whenever I want.
It has a simple command line interface and requires that you already have rtmpdump on your path. Get the sbs-downloader script here.
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I often find that many people have trouble distinguishing the many different kinds of cables that are commonly used in TVs and computers today. There are so many types, some of which do the same or similar tasks and have adaptors to go to and from each other. So, read on for a bunch of pictures and descriptions.
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