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

[David Brodbeck]

On Oct 11, 2007, at 2:03 PM, lanas wrote:

> On Friday, 5 October 2007 16:40:18 -0700,
> David Brodbeck <gull at gull.us> wrote :
>
>> 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.
>
> That's nice to know in the light of the VIA Arena messages I read
> today, a lot of them telling sqaurely to stay away from VIA and  
> live TV
> applications because, I gather, of DMA problems.
>
> I presume the Hauppage PVR500 I'm presently using has an MPEG encoder,
> or so the documentation says.  But what about XvMC ?  Will it be
> detected and properly parametrized by, say, the Mythdora install, or
> are there software patches and such to add to enable it ?

I've heard persistent rumors about DMA problems with VIA systems, but  
I haven't encountered them myself.  I don't know if it's specific to  
certain cards, specific to certain motherboards, or a problem that  
once existed but doesn't now.  There are quite a few of us using  
MythTV on miniITX systems, though, so if it were a common problem  
with the chipsets common on those boards I think we'd be hearing  
about it more often on the mailing list.

Yes, the PVR500 has an MPEG2 encoder.  Actually, the Adaptec AVC-2410  
I'm using has the same basic chipset as the Hauppage PVRxxx series.   
It works very well -- CPU consumption during recording is practically  
nil.

When I first started using this system for MythTV, a year or two ago,  
I had to manually install the VIA driver.  However, a lot of  
distributions now include the X.Org OpenChrome driver and the kernel  
DRI module.  When I recently installed OpenSUSE 10.3 I didn't have to  
do anything special -- I just made sure X was using the 'via' driver,  
selected 'VIA XvMC' in my Myth playback settings, and it worked.   
Even TV-out was plug-and-play.  I don't know what Mythdora includes,  
driver-wise, because I haven't used it.

Be careful what you buy, because some of the newer VIA chipsets  
aren't supported by the Linux video drivers yet.