[mythtv] Followup Re: mythfrontend on Via EPIA M - success (sort of)

[Larry Matter]

I got an email from someone saying they were holding off buying the epia M
based on my earlier email so I figured I should give an update (at least
to have it in the archives).

I've had a bit of a change of heart about this platform and now I am going
to try to make it work (as a frontend only).

First of all, I can play 400x480 mpeg4 @2200 and it looks decent.  Not
perfect, but much better than a VCR tape.  My wife saw the picture and
thought it looked really good, which is another good datapoint (since, as
the person making it, I tend to be more nit-picky).

Performance of live TV gets bad when the OSD is up.  The OSD is nice, but
normally I would not need it so I plan to make a patch to make the OSD
optional; maybe I will be the only one to use it.  I can always hit "i" if
I want the OSD (or go to the EPG).

Aditionally, I also purchased an NVidia card with TV out (with cx25871,
not bt869) and, while I can get it to work using nvtv, the signal quality
actually looks better coming from the epia (to me anyways).

And lastly, vanity weighs in.  I cannot find a small (and cheap) case that
I like for micro ATX platforms.  Add to that the task of finding low
profile cards, and it gets even harder.  And then there is noise.  Trying
to make an AMD based system "silent" will be quite a chore I think.

However, the Morex Cubid 26xx cases are really small and attractive (they
do need some mods to fit the newer EPIA M board though).  And they should
be very quiet.

Anyway, I don't want people to avoid this platform based on my early
experience with it.  If anyone is considering playing around with this
platform I'd be happy to walk them through the setup.

Larry Matter

> Howdy,
>
> This morning I was finally able to get mythfrontend to run on my Via
> EPIA M 9000.  Preliminary results are that is seems just barely able to
> handle it (this was not totally unexpected).
>
> I had to use mpeg4 intead of rtjpeg (otherwise it was way too jerky).  I
> also obviously had to disable deinterlace since the C3 doesn't support
> MMX2.  I had to reduce the capture resolution from 640x480 to 480x480 to
> remove the remaining occasional jerkiness.   But after all that, the
> picture is pretty decent.
>
> While watching live-tv, if I change the channel, it takes about 5
> seconds for the picture and audio to settle down and sync up; the OSD
> definitely affects it.  Un-pausing live tv works fine.  The lack of
> deinterlace is fine for talking heads, but bad for sports or other
> motion intensive shows.
>
> Interesting to me is that while running top, I noticed that the X server
> was using more CPU than mythfrontend (about 38%).
>
> At this point my opinion is that this motherboard is not ready for
> mythtv.
>  It was lot of work to get everything set up and I had to make a lot of
> compromises (largly due to binary-only drivers).  I could probabaly
> further optimize things but I'm not sure it is worth the time it would
> take.  Guess I'm off to find a new mobo...This one is about to become my
> email server.
>
> BTW, the Myth Docs were invaluable in getting this to work.
>
> Larry