[mythtv-users] help picking FE/BE components

[Johnny]

> All things being equal, I'd like low noise and power consumption, but
> it's not a priority for me right now.  I'll be using this system for more than
> just a myth... I'm going to use it as a desktop when I work from home.
> Also, since it's my first myth system, I don't want to piddle around with
> marginal processing power.  Perhaps I'm underestimating the noise thing...
> I have a Dell 2.8 GHz Pentium D based system right now that I tested
> mythtv on and I don't hear a peep out of it.  Is this phenom 2 that I picked
> going to sound like a Cessna?  If so, can I underclock it or disable cores
> via the BIOS and make it quieter?

This has more to do with your heatsink/fan than the CPU. Any processor
you look at is going to have a fan. You can use fancontrol to slow
than fans down when it is idling and it should be quiet. Worse case
you guy a quiet fan from Scythe or somebody like that. It isn't too
hard to get a virtually silent CPU fan.

> Yes, I do.  I really don't care about it most of the time, but I don't
> want to build a system today that can't handle HD just for future
> proofing it.  I think I'm going to go with an earlier response and
> go with this GT220 card:
>
> http://www.frys.com/product/6054898
>
> According to this:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDPAU
> it should be able to handle "Complete acceleration for
> MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 Part 2 , VC-1/WMV9 and H.264"

There are two separate issues being discussed. VDPAU does the decoding
and deinterlacing. All of the VDPAU cards can decode HD video. The 2xx
series cards have added the ability to decode MPEG-4 part 2 (aka
xvid/divx). Almost all of the cards can to all of the deinterlacers
with the exception of the highest quality one, Advanced 2x. So all the
discussion about whether a VDPAU card can do HD is generally referring
to whether it can do Advanced 2x deinterlacing on HD. Since you are
building a new system and want to have some future proofing, then it
is probably wise to go with the GT220. The only downside is you may
want to find a fanless card, and I don't think anybody has found a
fanless GT220 that was available and actually for sale.