[mythtv-users] Chromecast

[Karl Dietz]

On 26.07.2013 04:16, marcus hall wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 06:50:50PM +0000, Gary Buhrmaster wrote:
>> On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 6:37 PM, Tom Hayward<esarfl at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> ...
>>> They don't advertise MPEG2 support, but this would make MythTV support
>>> much more useful (at least with my content).
>>
>> Probably the same reason few phones/tablets support MPEG-2
>> HW decode, in that the chip may be capable of it, but you save
>> a few dollars per device by not licensing it (and you save
>> bandwidth requirements too, which can be important when you
>> are doing things wirelessly).
>
> What about the various "thumb computers" like the Ug802, MK808B, Ug007, etc.?
> They are about $40-45 on Amazon, have seemingly decent CPU and GPU devices
> (I don't think they are supported by MythTV, though)..  They all run
> Android 4.1 and claim to support 1080p with a ton of various video formats
> supported.
>
> It should be possible to run the Android front end on these, shouldn't it?
> It may be possible to run the standard front end as well...  Any experience
> with these devices?

If anyone is serious about getting the standard frontend ready to run
on el-cheapo hardware then I strongly advise to start with the bigger 
Arm systems instead of directly jumping to the smallest/cheapest systems
directly.

I started to collect small systems at 
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/ARM_Systems, contributions welcome :-)

Starting with a system that already runs Ubuntu and has a normal amount
of main memory allows you to concentrate on adding the video decoder
support instead of having to do all steps at once.
(The other steps being system memory reduction, adaption of the
rendering pipeline to less graphics memory, packaging mythtv to
some ReallySmallLinuxDistribution, adding preconversion for all images 
as the cpu is dog slow when converting all the nice fanart to
compressed textures.)

Regards,
Karl