[mythtv] Hardware Platform

[Isaac Richards]

On Tuesday 31 December 2002 10:49 am, Andrew B wrote:
> Anyway, one thing that I think would be a great idea would be to specify a
> hardware platform for MythTV. Has anyone tried it on the VIA EPIA
> motherboards? They are highly integrated and fit in mini iTX cases (17cm
> square motherboard). They have audio, video (with TV-out including
> S-Video), lan, usb, firewire (and even MPEG2 decoding in the M series) all
> in hardware. Take a look at this site:
> http://www.via.com.tw/en/VInternet/mini_itx.jsp. Add a small internal TV
> tuner (or an external USB one), a quiet hard drive, and a slim DVD-ROM
> player and put it all in a little black iTX case (see www.shentech.com) and
> you have a pretty slick PVR machine. And you could put the whole thing
> together for less than $500.

And you're stuck a really slow CPU.  Yeah, that'll work great for real-time 
video encoding.  Benchmarks I've seen of those show them barely able to play 
back video.

I don't see why everyone's so impressed by the size of these.  Anything 
smaller than a standard audio component is just silly -- there's plenty of 
desktop cases that take full-sized motherboards (and thus modern CPUs), 
aren't any bigger than your standard AV receiver, and won't look out of place 
in most people's setups. 

Isaac