On Nov 8, 2007 8:37 PM, Brian Wood <<a href="mailto:beww@beww.org">beww@beww.org</a>> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Brad wrote:<br>> I have been saving up my cashola for a new mobo and processor for a<br>> while now, for a mythbox that I want to build. I already have a<br>> tv-tuner card, tv-out video card, and a large hard drive for storage.
<br>><br>> I was wondering if people think the $200 everex gPC that is being sold<br>> at walmart would be powerful enough for DVD/movie playback and streaming<br>> live TV? It comes preloaded with Ubuntu, so it shouldn't be too hard to
<br>> install mythTV. Here are the specs I could find:<br>><br>> Mobo: VIA pc2500 (micro-ATX)<br>> Processor: 1.5 GHz Via C7-D<br>> Ram: 512 MB (expandable up to 2GB)<br>> Graphics: Integrated, shared memory (hopefully this can be disabled)
<br>> Expansion: 2 PCI slots<br>> Audio: Onboard 6-Ch AC97<br><br>The VIA mobos are known to sometimes cause problems with Myth, and the<br>VIA CPUs have pretty small caches.<br><br>The graphics would be a problem, and you didn't mention any AGP or
<br>PCI-Express slots. While folks have used PCI video cards I'm not sure if<br>they would work with that setup<br><br>A BIG maybe for SD, and a definite NO for HD, IMHO.<a href="http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users" target="_blank">
</a></blockquote><div><br>Whether it has enough CPU power depends quite a bit on what the video source is and how it'll be displayed. I have one Myth frontend/backend machine with an old AMD Duron 800 MHz CPU in a Via-based mobo. It started with a PVR-150 and a Radeon 8500 with SVideo out. It worked well enough, but now it has the PVR-150 and a PVR-350 for both recording and playback.
<br><br>Most of the time, the CPU is not working too hard, even when recording two shows and playing back a third. Commercial flagging could be faster though, as it proceeds equal to or less than playback speed and bogs the machine down a bit. Video playback is great on a CRT TV, since the PVR-350 handles that. Obviously, it doesn't handle HD at all. I would guess that the Everex motherboard would be an ample replacement in that machine, saving power while possibly increasing performance.
<br><br>OTOH, I expect most systems I will build in the future will be HD capable, which makes any current Via chip iffy. Theoretically, the decoder functionality of the Unichrome graphics allows HD MPEG-2 playback with low power CPUs like the C7, but I don't know how much luck people have had with that so far.
<br><br>Jonathan Rogers<br></div></div>