[mythtv-users] Fanless: What about VIA mobos ?

[David Brodbeck]

On Oct 5, 2007, at 3:37 PM, lanas wrote:
>   But, these CPUs are low end.  I'm presently running MythTV on a Asus
> Pentium board (which has an issue with AGP bus so I can't use an AGP
> video card with TV out) with 1 GB RAM and the live TV images are  
> choppy.
>
>   How then, can a slower VIA CPU and lesser RAM fare regarding the
> choppiness of live TV feed ?

I have a VIA motherboard with a 1 GHz Nehemiah M10000 CPU.  It serves  
in a combined frontend/backend.  Live TV works fine.  However, I'm  
using an MPEG2 capture card, so the load of encoding the recorded  
video doesn't fall on the CPU.  I'm also using XvMC acceleration for  
playback.

I don't think this machine would have the CPU power to do live TV  
with a frame grabber card and MPEG4 encoding, but I haven't tried  
it.  It will play back MPEG4 without a problem, but MPEG4 playback  
isn't accelerated and consumes about 40% of the CPU.

But, this is *not* a fanless system.  With M-series systems you have  
to go below 1 Ghz to get fanless operation.  It is, however, fairly  
quiet and very compact.  Overall, to my ears, the noise level is  
about equivalent to a VCR with the video heads spinning.  Most of  
that noise actually comes from the case fans -- I'm using a very  
slender case, which means it needs smaller, higher speed fans.  A  
larger case that could accommodate a bigger, slower fan would be  
quieter.