Performance
Video recording performance was measured using a Model 3400+ Athlon 64 (2.2GHz, 1MB, Socket 745) on an ASUS K8V motherboard (VIA K8T800 chipset) with a single 512MB Corsair XMS3500 DIMM (2-2-2-6 timings).Video quality was set to 'Best' at all times, CPU usage was measured using a custom application that reads Windows performance counters.
The record source was a playback of the first 5 minutes of the first Lord of the Rings movie on DVD, outputting to the S-Video capture port on the P7000.
For comparison, 5 minutes of live TV was recorded at each setting and very similar results were obtained. The live TV source wasn't used for the graphs for exact comparison reasons, but the performance is very similar.
The CX23882 processor on the P7000 is capable of real-time MPEG-2 encode from HDTV sources, so the low-ish CPU usage on the Model 3400+ is a testament to its apparent ability. CPU usage spikes horribly when changing channels, but otherwise the CPU usage plot is very steady.
The 23% at MAX quality at the 'Best' setting is comprised of the system recording the video to disk and playing back the video in the playback window, at the same time.
Use of hardware overlays as provided by DirectX 9.0 mean that CPU usage can be kept to a bare minimum during playback.
