[mythtv-users] Energy Efficient Front End

[David Watkins]

2009/3/25 Yan Seiner <yan at seiner.com>:
> I have a car-puter that has a myth be/fe on it.  It's not used for
> recording at all - no tuners.
>
> It's an energy sucking hog.  This is a problem since it kills the
> batteries in short order.
>
> Is anyone using an energy efficient car-puter with myth?  Mostly for
> movies; HD would be nice but not necessary.  The slowest, least energy
> hungry CPU out there.  An ARM box would be nice.


When I looked at doing this the via EPIA boards were what most people
were using.  They have inbuilt S-Video and handle standard def pretty
well.  They're still around but guess they're pretty long in the tooth
now though and there are a lot of new mini motherboards about.

I didn't go ahead in the end.  What I actually did was buy a twin
screen car DVD setup for about £80 with a composite input and plug my
IPOD classic into it.  One screen can be watching a DVD while the
other listens to music or watches an mp4 video(transcoded via mythtv)
off the IPOD.  It's turned out really well (once I realised that for
some reason you need to really boost the audio volume when
transcoding).  The IPOD can easily hold 10 to 20 hours of video.

It's hardly HD  (320 x 240 pixels I think !!)  but on a 7" screen that
looks suprisingly sharp and a 7" screen is big enough when it's right
in your face.  If I were you I'd do without HD, particularly if you
want to minimise power.