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What is your MythBox Power Consumption?
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Author:  hunter44102 [ Thu Aug 10, 2006 7:26 am ]
Post subject:  What is your MythBox Power Consumption?
All,

What kind of power are your MythBoxs using? One of mine is using 62 watts standby, and 82 watts when watching or recording a show. The other is 80 standby, 100 watching.

To measure, you need a wattmeter like Kill-a-Watt

Does Knopp MythTV have any power saving options? It would be nice to go into a low power mode unless recording or watching.
Author:  cesman [ Thu Aug 10, 2006 5:43 pm ]
Post subject: 
What is Knopp MythTV? KnoppMyth includes nvram-wakeup which is probably the best way to save power... When idle, the box simply shuts down and wakes up X time before a recording...
Author:  hunter44102 [ Fri Aug 11, 2006 9:40 am ]
Post subject:  NVRam Wakeup
Thanks I will look into the nvram-wakeup function

(I wasn't sure if it was part of MythTV itself or Knoppmyth, and you answered my question)
Author:  lilestj [ Wed Sep 06, 2006 5:15 pm ]
Post subject: 
And WOL?
I am on the verge of upgrading my mobo/cpu (a7n8x-vm400 with a1700+ to an a8n deluxe/a3800+x2). The only thing holding me back from nvram-wakeup is poor support on that crappy matx mobo for features like WOL. There have been too many occaisions when I've remotely scheduled recordings on a whim when I've not been home to let that go by...

Does anyone know of a web-friendly implementation to send a magic packet to wake-up the myth-backend?
Author:  mythedoff [ Wed Sep 06, 2006 5:57 pm ]
Post subject: 
lilestj wrote:
...clipped...

Does anyone know of a web-friendly implementation to send a magic packet to wake-up the myth-backend?


I've not used it but perhaps this might:
http://www.dslreports.com/wakeup
Author:  SScorpio [ Mon Sep 11, 2006 5:11 pm ]
Post subject: 
The biggest issue with wake on LAN is if you have a router the magic packet can and likely will be blocked. The way I get around it is having a router with a custom Linux firmware that has an exposed an SSH server to the outside world. I then just log into the router with Putty or some other SSH client and type "./wol" which runs a script that calls ether-wake on my router. This causes my PC to then boot remotely without having too much exposed to the outside world with a firewall.
Author:  tuatara [ Wed Sep 13, 2006 1:47 am ]
Post subject: 
I use a VIA MII10000 with a PVR350.

Not much in the CPU stakes, but its about 25 watts idle - the same as a dim bulb. 70-80 watts when busy.

Downsides are

- adskipping takes all night, so I haven't bothered to investigate auto-shutdown and wakeup.
- mythstreamtv just doesn't work - not enough grunt to drive VLC fast enough.
Author:  infinitenothing [ Sat Sep 23, 2006 1:07 am ]
Post subject:  Re: What is your MythBox Power Consumption?
hunter44102 wrote:
All,

What kind of power are your MythBoxs using? One of mine is using 62 watts standby, and 82 watts when watching or recording a show. The other is 80 standby, 100 watching.

To measure, you need a wattmeter like Kill-a-Watt

Does Knopp MythTV have any power saving options? It would be nice to go into a low power mode unless recording or watching.


I have a Kill-a-watt too. 90 idle, 130 watching. I think I calculated once that it's $1 per Watt-Year so maybe $100/year if I were to run it nonstop.
Author:  animatt [ Thu Oct 05, 2006 7:28 pm ]
Post subject: 
tuatara
How many hard drives are in your setup?? 80watts seems very high for that board. Even under full load cpu usage should not go up much and I do not think the 350 takes that much power.

I have an amd geode 1750nx on a jetway board it has 2 seagate 3.5 inch hard drives. 512 ram 1 pvr-500 and 1-80 mm fan.

When I idle I have the one hard drive spin down and I use about 53watts of power. When I have 2 recordings going and watching show still with one hard drive still not spinning I run about 60 watts.
If I do not put the drive to sleep I run about 65 watts watching a recording and having 2 shows recorded.
Author:  mjl [ Thu Oct 05, 2006 8:36 pm ]
Post subject: 
Hi animatt,

Quote:
I have the one hard drive spin down
What / how do you shut down / spin drives back up? Been looking for that trick :) Maybe even able to save a watt or two also..

Mike
Author:  animatt [ Thu Oct 05, 2006 9:05 pm ]
Post subject: 
Right now I have 2 hard drives they are setup as an lvm so it appears to my as one large give. That said I still have tons of space left on the one hard drive before it will start saving to the other one. So the other one is in no use at all right now.

Command

su <-- become root
hdparm -S XXX YYYY
where XXX is a number 1-250ish this number get multiplied by 5 and that is the number of seconds it takes with no disk activity to spin done the drive.
YYYY is the actual device you wish to suspend.
IN my case the line looks like
hdparm -S 2 /dev/hdb
this takes 10 second no disc activity to spin down /dev/hdb

note this is not a system drive at all. I tried with the system drive and did not expect it to work and it diid not. There is constant logging on the / partition so it is always in use. I am actually wondering if there is an easy way to set all logging info to log /dev/null or possibly in a small ram disk. This way the only thing written to the drive is actually show recording. But I have not looked into it but I going to in near future. I save about 5 watts per drive.
I use a killa-watt meter so not terribly acccurate. I do also save a slight bit turn ram voltage down ( not a common motherboard setting) also should save a little by setting the ram to lower speeds. MY machine is mostly a backend. Only use frontend to test few things out so I really do not need tons of power. It uses hardware encoders so no issue to push any limits.
It does comflagging based on 2nd level option forget what it was but not simply black frames and it runs 60fps maybe little more maybe little less. Not a really performance machine but does run fairly nice for its power consumption. Maybe if I get into reencoding to mpeg4 I will beefg performance back up.

Also I am not sure how much ram a system needs. I have 2 tuners but may go up to 3 in the future (differnet board) For 1 tuner I know 256mb is plenty this should also save so volts. I know it is not much but why not if you do not need it.

anyway enough rambling
Author:  mjl [ Thu Oct 05, 2006 9:48 pm ]
Post subject: 
Hi animatt,

Thank you. I sometimes move / cp stuff off to an external usb drive and it would be nice to shut it down after it finished. Will give it a try and now know what to look for to obtain more details. :)

May not be much, but every pebble in the well counts.

Mike
Author:  tuatara [ Fri Oct 06, 2006 1:14 am ]
Post subject: 
animatt wrote:
tuatara
How many hard drives are in your setup?? 80watts seems very high for that board. Even under full load cpu usage should not go up much and I do not think the 350 takes that much power.

I have an amd geode 1750nx on a jetway board it has 2 seagate 3.5 inch hard drives. 512 ram 1 pvr-500 and 1-80 mm fan.

When I idle I have the one hard drive spin down and I use about 53watts of power. When I have 2 recordings going and watching show still with one hard drive still not spinning I run about 60 watts.
If I do not put the drive to sleep I run about 65 watts watching a recording and having 2 shows recorded.


Some good questions.
I have one drive, and a couple of external self-powered USB/firewire drives. The power measurements were measured under load with a single drive and single PVR-350, CD drive.

I now have PVR-350 + PR-250 + USB HDD + Firewire HDD (both self powered).

Your idle power seems higher than I expected, and certainly higher than the standard idle load of a Via mobo.
Author:  animatt [ Fri Oct 06, 2006 8:34 am ]
Post subject: 
Yeah it starts fairly high but really does not move to much under load.

I am not sure if there are power saving features in the cpu that I am not using maybe something to scale it back when not in use. I may test out athcool to see if that helps any not sure.

If I get everything setup I might start messing around with nvram-wakeup. I guess really depends on how my machine developes. If I turn out to use 4 tuners it my not even be worth putting machine to sleep.

Anyway thanks for quick reponse.

Anyone know where all the logging on / happens?
Maybe I can mount a ram disk over it so the disk will not have any activity. And can go to sleep
Author:  neutron68 [ Thu Nov 23, 2006 11:23 am ]
Post subject:  any wake-up delay?
Is there a delay when the drive needs to wake up and record?

I have a separate hard drive setup for my /myth partition and I'd like to put it to sleep when it's not recording. My concern is any potential delay in wake-up.

For example, if a recording is scheduled to begin at 8:00:00am, will the drive automatically be spun up just before 8:00:00am and ready to record right at 8:00:00am?

Eric
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