[mythtv-users] most energy efficient myth frontend?

[Paul Bender]

Yan Seiner wrote:
> I'm building an A/V system into our new RV.  I'm trying to find a PC 
> that is small, rugged (SSD drives, fanless, etc) and uses as little 
> energy as possible.

In order to figure out the best choice, one needs to know how often the 
frontend will be used for playback and how long the frontend will be 
sitting idle.

During playback, I have found that whether you use th eCPU for video 
decoding or you use GPU for the video decoding, the power consumption is 
within a few watts. When not during playback, I use S3 suspend. 
Therefore, it is not an issue.

If small is a concern, then an NVIDIA+ATOM ION platform is likely the 
best choice as you can build a Mini-ITX, fanless solution.

However, I have chosen an NVIDIA+AMD solution. While it is larger 
(Micro-ATX), it is still quiet (assuming a case with quite fans (e.g. a 
case with 120mm fans) and it is power efficient since I use the remote 
(as well as a script) to trigger S3 suspend when the frontend is idle. 
In addition, because I use the CPU to decode, I am not at the mercy of 
the video driver providers for new codecs and existing codecs with 
different parameters.