[mythtv-users] Current SFF Frontend of choice

[Matt Garman]

On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 8:13 AM, William Powers <wepprop at gmail.com> wrote:
> Of course, opinions will vary but if I were putting together a new frontend
> today, I would put a G620T with the OEM HSF on a mini-ITX board and use
> OpenGL playback with the integrated Intel graphics

I second this.  I'm running an i3-2100 on a mini-itx motherboard in a
small case.  Power consumption is less than 20 watts at idle, and so
far, I haven't had any playback issues.

> The only trick is that I had to remove all trace of the nvidia driver and I
> had to patch and recompile the Mesa rpm's from instructions I found on this
> list. Hopefully the distros will pick up the upstream patch very soon and
> make the latter unnecessary. The advantage to using OpenGL on Intel graphics
> is I don't need a discrete NVidia GPU that adds 10 or 15 watts at idle.
>  With a pico-PSU it should idle under 20 watts and use an extra 5 to 10
> watts during HD playback.  Plus you don't have to deal with NVidia
> proprietary drivers.

I probably should have mentioned this sooner, but if you're using
CentOS: the maintainer of the elrepo mesa package has incorporated
said patch.