Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005: Feature and Performance Investigation
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 12, 2004 12:19 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
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Multituner Performance
For our next test we wanted to see how much more overhead adding a second tuner card and recording two programs would cost us. We recorded a show in the background while watching another TV show, once again all while varying CPU clock speed over time - the rest of our testbed remained the same.
We left the results from only a single tuner on the same graph to see the extra penalty incurred by going to dual tuners. As you can see, you basically add on another 10% CPU usage for recording one program while watching another. You can extrapolate that to get an idea of what kind of hardware you'd need for 3 tuners.
But once again, even in the worst configuration we're still only looking at 54% CPU usage, that's more than enough to spare. But what happens when you start scrolling through the program guide for something else to watch when you're sick of one of your programs?
We continued our experiment by scrolling through the program guide while recording one program and while we had another show running in its window in the corner of the guide. Here the average CPU utilization increases dramatically, with everything slower than 2GHz racking up over 90% CPU utilization.
Once you get closer to 100% CPU utilization that's when things start to get choppy and we saw some serious reductions in smoothness on our lower end configurations. Interestingly enough, even in our choppiest configuration the MCE system was still more responsive and faster navigating through the guide than a Tivo. What we lost was the smooth transitions from one page in the guide to the next, or from one listing to the next, everything was a lot more jerky.
The plot thickens when you look at maximum CPU utilization during the time period, while the three fastest CPUs had their average utilizations in the 70s, their peak CPU usage figures were in the 80s and 90s, bordering on 100% CPU utilization. Whenever we hit 100%, something had to give, but luckily it was always the speed of the menu, never the frames in the video - something we were very appreciative of.
Another interesting phenomenon we noticed was that the slower the system got, the more prone it was to crashes. The larger the processing and disk queues got, the more our custom built Socket-939 testbed with aggressive memory timings started to crash. The majority of the crashes were hard locks and they didn't happen at all with the faster CPU configurations, but they definitely happened once we dropped below 1.6GHz.
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martydee - Sunday, February 6, 2005 - link
Does anyone know if a PVR card with a hardware DVD DECODER (such as the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR 350) is compatible with Windows MCE? And would a hardware decoder give any real benefits to the system over the software equivilent (i.e. nVidia DVD decoder)?louisb - Thursday, January 13, 2005 - link
mulminute - Wednesday, October 20, 2004 - link
My biggest use is sending music and photos to entertainment center,. Should I use MC 2004 or wait for 2005mulminute - Wednesday, October 20, 2004 - link
My biggest use is sending music and photos to entertainment center,. Should I use MC 2004 or wait for 2005CZroe - Sunday, October 17, 2004 - link
"Windows MCE will never be any use for people serious about video until it allows you to select what codecs you want to use for encoding from all the DirectShow codecs installed on your system. Having to use the proprietary MS stuff with all their DRM garbage is unsuitable."You're clearly one seriously misinformed individual. MCE isn't an interface to multiple video formats and types and simply wonld not function correctly if it were.
Understand this: An MCE PC has one or more TV tuners and video capture cards in it and they will function exactly like any other PC with that hardware. If you want to record in the format of your choice with an XP MCE PC, no one is stopping you. Fire up your application of choice, select your codec and complain to the software maker that they don't have their own integrated EPG and automatic scheduling capabilities. Honestly, how would you expect EVERY format to support embedded CC and on the fly sequence removal? How could you expect hardware encoding support for any directshow enabled codec? You can't just throw a pre-encoded MPEG2 stream from the hardware into any encoder and expect real time results.
glennpratt - Thursday, October 14, 2004 - link
Definately go to www.thegreenbutton.com/community I'm in the US so I don't know much about getting EPG and what not in Australia, but there are a bunch of people from around the world there. The first page load is excruciatingly slow on the site, but once you on its OK.tantryl - Thursday, October 14, 2004 - link
Quick question that again I haven't seen addressed that much. On the Best/Better etc. quailty settings, what is the average MB/hour ratio?How many hours could you store on your average 200GB (191 real GB)?
tantryl - Thursday, October 14, 2004 - link
Thanks glenn.I'm in Australia so TiVo or the like is not currently an option (although I've heard rumours it'll be here within another year). The main problem with it is the program guide.
Australia is officially supported by MCE2005, and I'm very interested in just what that means. So far it looks like no Australia specific music or movie internet services are supported, but I can't find anything to say definately either way. I'm so desperate I'm even considering ringing up Microsoft and going through the quagmire that is customer relations there. But the good thing is, I'm fairly certain (although again, not seen it in writing yet) that the program guide system will work. We only have 5 free-to-air channels and a couple of pay-tv subscription services (that are really the same service packaged differently) so it shouldn't be too hard for them to keep up to date.
Looking at the performance I'm not seeing a hugley compelling reason to go any higher than a Sempron 3100+ although that might be something that would change once I actually get my hands on it and experience it.
Hmmmm. All interesting stuff.
glennpratt - Wednesday, October 13, 2004 - link
jamawass - There is an IR blaster connected to the remote USB reciever. There are two ports on it, but the old remote only came with one blaster, the new one which is actually cheaper then the old one comes with two.http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?desc...
If you have one you'll understand (or a linux based competitor). The flexibility is awesome (just think about it, it's a whole computer. Not only do you have all the flexibilty advanteges of MCE, you have a full blown OS underneath) compared to a Tivo. It's also MUCH MUCH faster then a Tivo.
As for stability, it all depends on the computer you build it on. You can't tell it's a PC if all you have is the remote. Mine has run for nearly a year, nonstop. You can even put it in S3 (Suspend to ram) and it will still wake up and record when it has to, just like Tivo.
Really, HTPC serves a very different market then Tivo. It has a million more uses then Tivo + DVD Recorder.
For me I have an old high end CRT data projector in my living room, and the cheapest thing I could connect to it when I first got it was a computer. Haven't looked back, even as transcoders have gotten much better and cheaper.
jamawass - Wednesday, October 13, 2004 - link
How does mce control digital cable boxes for scheduled recordings? Does the remote have a built in IR blaster?