[mythtv-users] Just a bit more juice Re: VDPAU support on 0.21-fixes

[Nick Rout]

On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 4:56 PM, Brad Templeton
<brad+myth at templetons.com> wrote:
>
> Speaking of VDPau.   My HD frontend is a now old P4-3ghz system with an
> AGP slot in an SFF case.   Looks and works fine, plays HDTV just fine, but
> sadly starts to groan under the weight of some h264 encoded HD videos.  So I
> have to watch those at one of my computers, which while they have even
> higher resolution screens, they are not 46" with a couch.
>
>
> There were rumours of Geforce 8 possibly coming out on AGP.   With vdpau,
> that might solve my problems.
>
> But I see no sign of it.
>
> Otherwise, it's a sad situation.   SFF systems don't readily support
> motherboard upgrade to get a mobo with either faster CPU or pci-e slot.
> There's only one PCI slot and it has a tuner card, so the PCI based
> cards are out, if they would work.
>
> So it seems I leave myself within one inch of near system replacement ...
> mobo, cpu, video card, ram, power supply, case -- preserving only keyboard,
> dvd and hard drive.   What a shame to just squeeze out a bit more power.
>
> Or are there some other tricks for getting those x264 videos to play
> smoothly on the P4-3ghz with 6200 video card?  (I could upgrade the 6200
> card to a 7xxx series card, but I doubt that would do anything.)

AGP card in 8 or 9 series seems impossible to find.

I have my eye on a SFF machine with a low profile PCI-e slot and 2 PCI
slots (HP DC7100). Its more or less an upgrade to the SFF machine I
have at present (HP D530S which is AGP low profile and 2xPCI). However
low profile fanless 8 or 9 series PCIe cards are also quite rare
(particularly with 512M RAM).

Seems to be many cards that have some combination of the attributes
(fanless|low profile|512M RAM) but not many with all of the above.

Maybe with the thermal load vdpau is rumoured to create a fan is a
necessary evil.