Lenovo D400 (Intel Atom 230) sufficient for Tvheadend?

Andreas Feuerstein

Hi,

I am thinking about installing Ubuntu on my Lenovo D400 Homeserver (Atom 230, 2GB Ram) and adding a Digital Devices Cine CT V6 tuner to it. I would use the server functionality only and not install XBMC on the D400. I would use other clients with it (Laptop, Raspberry PI, Smartphone). Does anyone know if the Atom 230 has enough power to run TvHeadend?

Thanks for your help!

ProfYaffle

I used to run tvheadend on a Revo R3600, which has an N230 1.6GHz processor. I don't recall any problems, although this was pre-HD to a great extent.

I would guess that CPU isn't necessarily your bottleneck, since it doesn't take that much to move the streams from tuner to disc; the biggest pinch points are likely to be the speed of your storage and/or the speed of your LAN connection. This is especially the case if you're looking at multiple tuners, multiple recordings/streams and multiple clients.

EDIT

I did see a comment/bug report about excessive CPU usage on 3.9, however - and I was running something relatively antediluvian by comparison - but I think Adam's response was along the lines of "yes, it's likely to be more intensive than 3.4 et al, but no, not by much".

Andreas Feuerstein

Thanks for your reply.

I just wanted to make sure that the CPU will be ok for Tvheadend as I would have to buy the DVB-C card which is quite expensive and I don't want to waste that money :) . Are 2 GB of Ram enough for 2 streams to be watched? The server will also host a SVN repository which is not used very often.

I think the other components are no bottleneck - I am using 3,5" HDDs which should be performant and the server has a GB-LAN interface.

Maybe another user in the forum is using the Atom CPU.