[mythtv-users] Fanless: What about VIA mobos ?

[R. G. Newbury]

lanas wrote:
> On Friday, 5 October 2007 16:40:18 -0700,
> David Brodbeck <gull at gull.us> wrote :
> 
>> I have a VIA motherboard with a 1 GHz Nehemiah M10000 CPU.  It
>> serves in a combined frontend/backend.  Live TV works fine.  However,
>> I'm using an MPEG2 capture card, so the load of encoding the
>> recorded video doesn't fall on the CPU.  I'm also using XvMC
>> acceleration for playback.
> 
> That's nice to know in the light of the VIA Arena messages I read
> today, a lot of them telling sqaurely to stay away from VIA and live TV
> applications because, I gather, of DMA problems.
> 
> I presume the Hauppage PVR500 I'm presently using has an MPEG encoder,
> or so the documentation says.  But what about XvMC ?  Will it be
> detected and properly parametrized by, say, the Mythdora install, or
> are there software patches and such to add to enable it ?

You should add the openchrome video driver to get the full benefit of 
the xvmc capabilities of the video chipset. Your PVR does on-hardware 
encoding on the 'in' side. The openchrome driver will do xvmc on the 
output side. Unless you have a DVI daughterboard, you will get better 
output from the VGA port than from the s-video plug. The TV-out 
(normally to the s-video output) will do NTSC/PAL (720x480 or so) levels 
but not more. The VGA output will do much better and the openchrome 
driver supports that.

Geoff