<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 2/13/06, <b class="gmail_sendername">Bryan Halter</b> <<a href="mailto:bhalter@armyofpenguins.com">bhalter@armyofpenguins.com</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
R. G. Newbury wrote:<br><br>>Bryan Halter wrote:<br>><br>><br>>>Jay R. Ashworth wrote:<br>>><br>>><br>>>>On Mon, Feb 13, 2006 at 05:24:52PM -0500, Bryan Halter wrote:<br>>>><br>
>>><br>>>><br>>>>>I've been looking at those too. From what I've seen I'd go with a<br>>>>>fanless SP which comes with built in MPEG4 decoding in addition to<br>>>>>MPEG2. There is Unichrome project support for both decoders last I
<br>>>>>heard. This becomes important if you want to display HD content.<br>>>>><br>>>>><br>>>>><br>>>>Source and price on those?<br>>>>-- j<br>>>>
<br>>>><br>>>><br>>>You can get the CL board you were looking at here:<br>>><br>>> <a href="http://www.iboxpc.com/shopping/product.php?productid=9&cat=10&page=1">http://www.iboxpc.com/shopping/product.php?productid=9&cat=10&page=1
</a><br>>><br>>>for about $160 and you can get the SP here:<br>>><br>>><a href="http://www.iboxpc.com/shopping/product.php?productid=201&cat=10&page=2">http://www.iboxpc.com/shopping/product.php?productid=201&cat=10&page=2
</a><br>>><br>>>or the fanless variant here:<br>>><br>>><a href="http://www.iboxpc.com/shopping/product.php?productid=200&cat=10&page=2">http://www.iboxpc.com/shopping/product.php?productid=200&cat=10&page=2
</a><br>>><br>>>for $205. Please note I have no affiliation that I know of with<br>>><a href="http://iboxpc.com">iboxpc.com</a> they just happened to be one of the only vendors listed on<br>>>the VIA Embedded website that actually sells the SP board.
<br>>><br>>><br>><br>>If you are looking for a board of this sort, you may want to check out<br>>via's other offerings. There is a new motherboard out which has a VT1625<br>>tv video out chipset instead of the VT1623 which is in the SP13000. The
<br>>VT1625 is noted as being able to do "HD TV".<br>><br>>The VT1623 in the SP13000 does SD TV through the S-video out plug,<br>>directly from the motherboard.<br>><br>>I have been completely unable to find out any more information about the
<br>>capabilities of the board with the VT1625 but it sounds very very much<br>>like something I would like.<br>>Note that this motherboard really requires hardware-capable encoding<br>>cards, such as the PVR500 and HD3000. The former does the encoding on
<br>>board. The latter of course, does not have to do so, for digital MPEG<br>>streams. HD level output is another matter.<br>><br>>In a nutshell, these make a fantastic quiet backend or a fantastic quite<br>>frontend, but not for HD *** at the present time****. The next version
<br>>may remove that last proviso.<br>><br>>My System: SP13000 with PVR500, pcHD3000 in Silverstone LC11M case with<br>>Via's PCI riser and a flexible PCI extension cable, 512M RAM, 120G SATA<br>>hard drive, DVD+RW reader-writer driven from cable tv feed. About 28
<br>>unencrypted digital channels from Rogers Cable, Toronto, and 70 analog<br>>channels available to the PVR500. (Supposedly about 12 HD channels<br>>available around here OTA...but I have no antenna YET.)<br>>
<br>><br>><br>THANK YOU...I'd asked about highdef and the SP before and not gotten<br>anything really definitive<br><br><br></blockquote></div><br>I was under the impression that the EPIA SP would work fine for HDTV if your TV accepts a VGA or RGBHV input, but wouldn't work if your TV has DVI, HDMI, or component inputs (at least not without a VGA->Component converter). I'm planning to get one of these to use as a HDTV frontend. If you want the fanless version, you can also get it
<a href="http://www.ewiz.com/detail.php?name=MB-SP8000E">here</a>:<br><br><br><br>