[mythtv-users] Confusion - Myth/Epia/Unichrome ??

[Jon Bousselot]

Mike,

It's mostly straightforward.  There are EPIA kernels, and there are 
patches for regular kernels. 

Browse here:
http://epia.kalf.org/epia_kernel/

and here for the Xfree86 EPIA stuff
http://www.shipmail.org/~thomas/via/

I'm sure there are plenty more links for EPIA boards.

This is where I've been spending a majority of my free time.  My 
experience with MythTV and the VIA M6000 board has been very less than 
successful.  I can take about 20 solid steps forward, but then hit a 
major roadblock every time.  I've tried Slackware 9.1, Fedora 1, and 
just recently RH9.  Hoping to take advantage of binary drivers, I 
finally went to redhat, but ran into other issues trying to find ALSA 
RPM's that matched the kernel.  The list of grievances goes on for quite 
a while.  I really want to get this running on slackware, but I think my 
choice of hardware is giving me the biggest obstacle.  I can do this on 
a regular P2-300 (good for backend, but not for playback) using 
slackware and a pile of perl modules.    I did get Slackware to 
recognize ALL the VIA hardware using the kernel patches.   I think I ran 
into an IVTV error which finally frustrated me enough to try Fedora. 

I got my barebones system from www.caseoutlet.com, and got the VIA M6000 
board in the black case.  I got the memory from memoryx.com.  It 
probably wasn't the cheapest, but I needed a part for my Sun IPX also.  
It blends nicely with the other tv and radio equipment in the living 
room, and the three fans are amazingly quiet.  There is no CPU fan, and 
600MHz is all you get.  I wanted the mpeg2 decoder, and a quiet system.  
I'm using a Hauppauge PVR250.

If anyone else is struggling or succeeding with the EPIA M6000 board, I 
would really appreciate some tips!


-Jon Bousselot


>  Can someone please give me a sanity check here? I'm now totally 
> confused about the best way to take advantage of the open-source 
> drivers for hardware decoding with my Epia-M. I'm currently running 
> MythTV on my Epia with a stock RH9 install and the VIA binary drivers. 
> I'd like to switch to the open-source drivers, and possibly away from 
> RH altogether, maybe to Gentoo....but regardless of the distribution, 
> how do I get the open-source hardware decoding running? What 
> combination of things is required to get it done? Just Unichrome 
> installation? I don't think so. Is it the Epia Kernel, plus unichrome? 
> Or is there even more to it than that?
>
> Sorry if I'm being dense, but I'm definitely a bit confused at this 
> point.
>
> TIA,
> Mike
>
>  
>