[mythtv-users] Apple X11 or XDarwin?

[Eric Robinson]

Chris Ribe wrote:
>
>     > In short, it's great to be able to use my macbook as a frontend,
>     but it
>     > would suck as a dedicated frontend.
>
>     not to hijack this thread... but has anyone tried running Myth on
>     Linux via Parallels on OS X?  then maybe you'd have the best of both
>     worlds; although you may want more RAM in that case. :) 
>
>
> Linux under parallels doesn't provide access to any hardware
> acceleration for video, and can't handle HD playback.  The new VMWare
> offering might address this, but I really don't know.
>
> For that matter, is there anyone running linux on a mini that can
> testify to its 1080i playback capabilities?   I have a linux frontend
> that has a similar Intel 945 graphics chipset, and a not horribly
> slower 3Ghz P4,  and it  has trouble playing back 720p content.
To be honest, it might actually be horribly slower.  Check out
Tomshardware.com's CPU Charts.  I used "Mainline h.264 encoding" as the
benchmark and chose two processor approximations (a
still-branded-as-Pentium 3.0GHz model and a 1.86GHz Core 2 Duo model):
http://www23.tomshardware.com/cpu_2007.html?modelx=33&model1=881&model2=911&chart=431

As you can see, the Core 2 Duo is almost twice as fast as the P4.  Yikes.

At first I tried to run the "HDTV Playback" benchmark but the Pentium 4
didn't even show up on the chart.  None of them did.