<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 6:03 PM, Nick Rout <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:nick.rout@gmail.com">nick.rout@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
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Its a laptop!<br>
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I often see this, people set up an old machine as a trial, and are<br>
disappointed, putting them off for life.<br>
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Not that this is an old machine I guess.<br></blockquote><div><br><br>I didn't catch that bit. :) <br><br>How about the Broadcom Crystal HD? I don't know if there is a Myth patch yet, but if there is, there's a mini-PCIe card you could put into a laptop. I know XBMC supports it, and the drivers are open source, so I expect Myth will support it soon if it doesn't already. Even with offloading the playback, I expect a combined FE/BE on a laptop is going to have trouble with disk I/O with HD video.<br>
<br>If the OP is willing to spend some money, the Aspire Revo or similar would be a way to get a nice FE box. Still about $200US though. <br><br>h264 is tough to decode without help from dedicated hardware at HD resolutions. IIRC the recommendation for CPU only decoding was around 3Ghz Core2Duo. <br>
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