Hi All,
I have a Athlon 1800 (1GHz) Shuttle with a Nova-T on-board video (not using the AGP slot - everything is great except for live TV. The picture seems to freeze only for a fraction of a second, every one or two seconds - I think this co-incides with the writing to disk of the recording that you can later see in 'live tv'.

Its just enought to make it unpleasant to watch. Recorded TV is perfect.

I had alway put it down to the CPU being just too slow, but I have just build a P4 531 3GHz machine with a Radeo 9200 graphics card, loaded it up with another Nova-T card, and I get the same effect - in fact if anything its worse !

Has anyone seen this before ? Does anyone have seamless live TV with a NOVA-T card ?

Go into backend setup & set the hours for commercial skip processing to run for 'overnight'. Commercial skip processing steals a lot of processor cycles, and taken together with recording & playing back, can cause skipping when otherwise the processor could handle just the video coming & going... 'Commercial Skip' doesn't have to run while you're trying to watch it...

As far as I can tell it is turned off completely.

Is there any way I can turn off recording of live TV ?

On the P4 i've just tried MythDora out of interest, but it wasn't any different. With Windows 2k and the haupage software it seems OK so I wonder if its just a limitation of the linux driver. Running TOP in another console doesn't show high CPU - though I guess its an average over a second which isn't the point...

Can anyone confirm if they have smooth live TV with a Nova-T ?

No. Myth records live TV and plays it back immediately, resulting in a recording on the hard drive. Live TV is set up to erase the live TV recording in 24 hours (default), or the time can be changed in the setup.

I can't address the Nova-T question, having no experience with it.

Nova-t playback is usually very good on my Mythbox.
Have you added the harddrive optimisations from the wiki?
Adding all the modes for DMA improves performance of harddrives.
It could solve your problems.

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Version:R8
Intel C2D 7400, Nvidia 5600 via HDMI to Samsung B37B650TW (PAL), Asus P5QL-E mobo, 4Gb PC6400 DDR2 ram, Samsung Spinpoint 500 Gb & 1Tb drive, Nova-HD-S2 (x2)

Thanks for your help - it was DMA problems in the end - needed a new motherboard, but is now great.

Do the live tv recordings still get scanned for commercials? I don't think I've ever gone back into an old livetv recording to check...