[mythtv-users] silent and low-power: AMD or Intel?

[Johnny]

> Well, HD here in Germany is a tale of idiocy and unreliable promises
> so I just don't bother. It's just TV, I watch it, I delete it and I
> can live with mediocre quality as long as it doesn't stutter. Things
> close to my heart I buy on DVD to have the original audio track.
>
> So I'm not looking at a high performance machine, more quiet, reliable
> and efficient.
>
> So, if I took an AMD board and use the onboard ATI graphics, are the
> drivers reliable in a multiple screen setting?

You would be much better off going with onboard nvidia than onboard
ATI. Despite what some have said the nividia cards with the
proprietary nvidia drivers are going to give you the least trouble and
the highest quality you can get for video playback in Linux at the
moment. The vast majority of mythtv users are using nvidia cards and
you will find it much easier to get help if you do run into problems.
If you are interested in being quiet and low power, then getting a
fanless nvidia card or using onboard nvidia with VDPAU will work
great. This will offload the decode and deinterlacing to the video
card. Nvidia is the only game in town for full hardware decoding of
h.264, mpeg4, and mpeg2 right now. With VDPAU people are playing back
1080p h.264 material with <10% CPU load. Plus the VDPAU deinterlacers
are the highest quality you can currently get, regardless of HD or SD.
I recently got an nvidia 8400GS and started using VDPAU and I was
shocked at how much better my regular old SD recordings from my
pvr-150 looked with VDPAU and the Advanced 2x deinterlacer.