[mythtv-users] Latest thoughts on small silent frontends

[Stephen Worthington]

On Sat, 8 Mar 2014 18:30:47 -0500, you wrote:

>
>> On Mar 8, 2014, at 4:30 PM, Chris Lewis <chrislewis915 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Hi
>> 
>> I'm about to dedicate my current combined BE/FE to being a BE only. I want to add a couple of dedicated frontends to the system.
>> 
>> So what are the options for small cheap silent hd capable devices?
>> 
>> Has any work been done on getting the raspberry pi to work? Or some other arm based system?
>> 
>> If not what's best at the moment
>> 
>> Chris
>> 
>I have 3 of these and they work great. 
>
>http://www.asus.com/EeeBox_PCs/EeeBox_PC_EB1033/
>
>Greg Thompson

I would have thought that the Nvidia 610 in one of those was not
sufficiently capable of doing 1080i.  I know that when I got my Nvidia
220, Nvidia 210s were not able to do 1080i properly, and I thought
that same pattern of the cheapest chip(s) in the range not being able
to do proper deinterlacing of HD continued through all the subsequent
generations of Nvidia chips.  Most video hardware options now will
handle 1080p and all the non-interlaced formats just fine.  But for
1080i HD you need something capable of doing advanced 2x
deinterlacing, and that seems to need more (or better) shaders than
you get in the lowest Nvidia chips.  If the main CPU can handle the
deinterlacing, or you can get your TV to do it, then it would work
fine.  But an Atom CPU is not that capable.  So I think at least an
Nvidia 630 is what is required.