[mythtv-users] Advice on a silent PC/Mini ITX for DVI and DVB-T (maybe -S)

[Nicholas Piper]

Dear all,

I'm considering switching from Sky TV in the UK to MythTV, DVB-T or
DVB-S(2?).

My TV is an LCD with HDMI in, which will use DVI + analogue audio
too. It's an HD TV, so I thought I'd want a MythTV setup that could
cope, but I'm not certain now based on the hugely increased hardware
requirements.

To start with, I thought I'd want a very small Mini ITX machine that
has no fans or disks - I'd NFS mount some storage and a root
filesystem for booting. I'd put in a single Nova-T PCI card with two
tuners.

To make the most of the TV (because then it would be easy to use for
non-TV applications too), I thought to use DVI rather than S-Video
with a TV Encoder chip. However, most cheaper Mini ITX boards I find
require an add-on to do DVI, which puts the price into the 100-120 GBP
region. For that range (135), I could get the EX10000EG Motherboard
with Fanless 1GHz C7 CPU -
http://www.icp-epia.co.uk/index.php?act=viewProd&productId=186 This
has the 'advantage' of the HD-capable CX700M2 graphics processor, but
as of right now, this isn't supported for mpeg2 decoding -
http://wiki.openchrome.org/tikiwiki/tiki-index.php?page=HardwareCaveats
and I suspect the 1Ghz CPU isn't up to doing SD mpeg2 while I wait?

Does anyone have a recommendation for a Mini ITX motherboard which
would have DVI output, is cheap (so slow is OK), but has a supported
hardware mpeg2 decoder to make up for the lack of overall CPU power?

Or might I regret a slower processor, when I find I can't watch Flash
based video, mpeg4, etc.?

Much thanks for any advice,

 Nick