[mythtv-users] Mythtv 31 on a Zotac Ion

[Stephen Worthington]

On Fri, 14 Aug 2020 11:40:06 +0100, you wrote:

>On 14/08/2020 08:36, David Watkins wrote:
>> Thanks for the replies.
>> 
>> The box only has 2GB RAM sadly, and the BIOS steals 512K of that( 
>> onboard Graphics?), but one advantage of old hardware is I might be able 
>> to find some DDR2 memory lying about the house somewhere.
>> 
>> I didn't have any problems with the NIC or any other hardware when I did 
>> my test install yesterday, but I had to use quite an old version of the 
>> nVidia driver (340 I think).
>> 
>> Anyway the SSD arrived last night so I'm giving it a go, and if that 
>> board can't hack it then I'm on the lookout for new hardware.  I liked 
>> that ion board because it was small and quiet.  GUI wasn't snappy but it 
>> was OK, and the Video playback was pretty good.
>
>Please keep us posted. I for one would be very interested to know how 
>you get on. My frontend is on Zotac Ion. I hope to move from 29 to 31 at 
>some stage and have been wondering how well the new rendering code works 
>on this old, probably not much tested platform.

The Ions from that era usually had Nvidia GPUs, so MythTV should still
work fine with them.  The Nvidia code is the best tested.  Nvidia were
first with VDPAU support, so MythTV got code to use VDPAU, which meant
that when digital TV arrived, most MythTV users got Nvidia GPUs.  And
a lot of us have kept on using Nvidia GPUs ever since as the MythTV
code for them works very well.

However, old Nvidia GPUs now have the problem that Nvidia is no longer
supporting the drivers for them.  When means that there may not be any
packaged drivers that will work, and even if you compile older drivers
yourself, you will need patches to make them work with the newer
kernels.  This is all a great shame, as the hardware is still fine for
the job, and until you need 4k you should be able to keep on using
your old Nvidia hardware.