Hauppauge PVR 150 CPU usage

[pdavis68]

I bought a Hauppauge PVR 150 last week and I've been using it under Fedora Core 3 without any problems until today.

Basically, here's what I've got going on. I use my linux box via telnet sessions in DOS windows form my Windows box.

I normally have two windows open. One is capturing video (movies I'm playing off my TiVo) using a simple cat /dev/video > movie.mpg

The second window is running mencoder to encode previously captures mpgs into AVIs.

Now, this has been working great for the past week and mencoder was encoding at about 40fps while I was capturing. Now, suddenly, for with no changes in the system at all, mencoder is only encoding at about 13fps while I'm capturing. As soon as I stop capturing, it shoots back up to 40fps.

I should mention, mencoder is nice'd to 19 and has been.

It's just as if out of nowhere, the PVR 150 has suddenly started consuming a lot of CPU. I checked other processes and there's nothing else using it, and since the second I stop capturing, the encoding goes back to 40fps, it's clear that the PVR 150 is the issue.

Any ideas what could be causing this? How should I go about diagnosing this? Has anyone else had a similar problem?

Thanks.

Pete

[pdavis68]

Okay, and now suddenly the problems has gone away this morning. This is really strange.

I did a ps -AF last night while the problem was occurring and the
cat /dev/video > movie.mpg
process was taking up 22% of CPU while the mencoder process was only taking up 34% cpu. There was no accounting for the other 44% of CPU.

This morning, doing a ps -AF shows the cat/dev/video process taking up 0% CPU and the mencoder process taking 97% cpu.

I'm stumped.

Pete