[mythtv-users] hardware considerations: fast CPU vs nvidia/vdpau?

[Deyan]

On Jul 30, 2011 4:55 PM, "jedi" <jedi at mishnet.org> wrote:
>
> On Sun, Jul 17, 2011 at 04:03:16PM -0500, Matt Garman wrote:
> > On Sun, Jul 17, 2011 at 12:07:15PM -0700, Jason Long wrote:
> > > I've been happy using zotac atom/ion boards for FE with vdpau...
> > > Handles 1080p and 5.1 audio fine. Only ~15 watts idle, mini-itx,
> > > quiet, USB thumb drive for the OS, or a SSD. My backend has quad
> > > core for transcoding and commercial flagging and a redundant
> > > storage array for the data, so it uses up quite a bit more power.
> >
> > Right, but my question is (cost aside) what's the advantage of an
> > atom+ion over e.g. an i3-2100 system?  They'll both have about the
> > same power consumption at idle, but the latter gives you a lot more
> > flexibility in terms of having a powerful general-purpose CPU,
> > rather than a weak CPU and an application-specific GPU.
> >
> > And with the ion, you're messing with the proprietary nvidia drivers
> > (which, to their credit, are generally pretty painless to install)
> > and additional setup/configuration steps for making vdpau work.
>
>    Nvidia (and their blob driver) is still the best option even if
> you aren't planning on using the GPU to play all of your video. That
> sort of "overhead" is a bit of a constant regardless of what you decide
> in terms of your CPU.
>
>    Have any of the other xorg drivers improved (like intel) when it comes
> to dealing with HDTVs? I would be curious to see if using a modern intel
> embedded GPU is even an option with brute force decoding.
>

I just bought a new Mac mini with the base configuration last week and
immediately installed Linux on it and it runs just fine as a frontend using
CPU decoding with deinterlacing QAM recorded MPEG2 US TV. It runs a bit on
the warm side but nothing too worrying.

And it does use the embedded Intel graphics card.

Deyan
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-users/attachments/20110730/a3b5610a/attachment.html