Firstly I did a major hardware swap, moving my Antec PSU, 3800 and Nvidia 8600GT to my main box in return for a cheap X-Power PSU and 5200 X2. The X2 provides more grunt for software decoding H.264, enough to work in Windows but not myth as will be seen.
So with Mythubuntu 8.04.1 + latest upgrades, including from Paul Kendall's repository, I monitered the CPU usage over SSH whilst testing out the channels. I got around 40%-70% CPU overall, obviously the SD channels where lighter on the CPU than HD with TV3 causing the max load.
However despite not maxing out the CPU TV3 was unwatchable, freezing for half a second every 1-2 secs. This is a problem a few others with similar CPU's on the mythnz mailing list have and the solution is changing the 'skiploopfilter' settings, I think forcing myth to drop frames rather than lag. However what is required to make this change is beyond my current Linux/GNU abilities so I am putting this project aside for the moment. What also contributed to that decision is reports from others about frequent frontend crashes, something I don't want on a HTPC that gets regular use.
So now I am re-installing Mediaportal (the change in graphics cards did something weird to the Windows install) and will work on getting Mythbuntu installed onto my old IDE drive so I can have my USB drive back.
When I am prepared to figure out rebuilding patches etc, or Paul sets up a GUI to make these changes (as he indicated he may) I will revisit this. Until, MP it is. It may not be perfectly stable, or make every recording I schedule (NCIS 2 weeks ago came back with just the xml file, no .ts at all!), but the codecs work better for obvious reasons.
I am glad just to have something that works, support is very limited for these MPEG 4 codecs and will be for a while yet.
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