[mythtv-users] Inexpensive, preassembled, VDPAU-friendly frontends

Nick Rout nick.rout at gmail.com
Mon Dec 1 03:24:09 UTC 2008


On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 4:07 PM, Brad DerManouelian
<myth at dermanouelian.com> wrote:
> On Nov 30, 2008, at 6:50 PM, R. G. Newbury wrote:
>
>> The arrival of VDPAU makes a whole bunch of low power hardware,
>> previously discounted  because of being incapable of HD, back into
>> scope.
>> I just ran out and grabbed an nvidia 8400GS for my main myth box, but
>> given the low cost (about $45Cdn).
>>
>> But now, I think will grab a PCI board and resurrect the VIA SP13000
>> motherboard. That board, with 2 hard drives ran just under 50 watts
>> according the the Kill-o-watt. The on-board video chipset, although
>> great for SD was hopeless for HD so it was downgraded to a fileserver.
>> But WOW, it might make a really good mythbox again.
>>
>> (And I can move my most powerful motherboard from my rec room to my
>> office. You *will* note that I do have my priorities in order: TV
>> first!)
>>
>> The reason that no-one has discussed a low-power low-cost solution is
>> that this solution just DID NOT EXIST 2 weeks ago. And Isaac and the
>> un-named and un-known other toilers have done an amazing job getting
>> this working.
>
> Exactly why I posed the question and was met with "View the other
> threads as people have posted some built machines for under $200."
> along with someone telling me to look into atom systems and then
> posting benchmarks of the VDPAU. Someone else posted about using an
> Acer AspireOne laptop for some reason which doesn't use an nvidia
> chipset. <sigh>

I think people have been getting used to throwing CPU power at
decoding HD, given the difficulties (until 2 weeks ago) of hardware
decoding using any chipset in linux. With XvMC disappearing from the
higher end nVidia chips and cpus becoming cheaper and more powerful
its comparatively simple to say "throw a core2 duo and plenty of ram
at it...."

What we need is a machine with an atom processor and an nvidia onboard
chip. Perhaps Jeff is right, EPIA with a PCI video card.

Do any of those epia motherboards have a PCIe slot?


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