[mythtv-users] Nehemiah Performance for MPEG-4 Frontend

[Larry Matter]

I have both an M9000 (Ezra) and an M10000 (Nehemiah).  They seem to play
recodings (including livetv) just fine, both mpeg2 and mpeg4, with no
hardware assist.  This is at a decent quality of 480x480.  The nehemiah
can also handle 640x480 MPEG2, again with no hardware assist, and using
opensource drivers.

Where it has problems is when the OSD comes up. This requires
(appearently) substantial processing power to overlay the OSD on the
video.  But you can make that better (choose fill mode instead of
transparent).  Then it is really only an issue when changing channels
during live TV.

Once you get a cache of shows you want to watch, you will probably find
you don't watch much LiveTV.  So my opinion is that these boards work just
fine as frontends.  They will work even better when MPEG2 support becomes
available for all distributions, not just a few shrink-wrapped ones.

FYI, I have made a frontend only distribution for this hardware, see
http://linpvr.org for more info.

Larry


> I am thinking of buying a EPIA M10000 board for use as a frontend only.
> I have seen many posts with issues related to the performance of these
> boards but most are related to playing MPEG-2 files generated by a
> PVR-250.  I have both a PVR-250 and a bttv based card so I will have
> files in both MPEG-2 and MPEG-4.  I am assuming that the hardware
> decoder will only be useful for the MPEG-2 files.  And most of the posts
> I have seen with concerns about speed start with the question "Are you
> using the proprietary video drivers?"  And as I understand it these
> accelerated drivers also only help for the MPEG-2 format.  So my
> question is do these boards have enough processing power to make a good
> frontend for all myth encoding formats?  I would love to get one of
> these boards and put it in a tiny case and really take advantage of the
> frontend/backend nature of mythtv.  But I don't want to buy one if
> others already know it won't do what I am looking for.
>
>
> Eric
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