[mythtv-users] Trimslice ARM PC

[Mark Lord]

On 11-12-27 11:24 AM, Brian J. Murrell wrote:
> On Tue, 2011-12-27 at 10:10 -0600, jedi wrote:
>>     You don't need to buy a new box for that. Just put a new video card
>> into a really old PC.
> 
> A "really old" PC won't take a VDPAU video card.  AFAIU the minimum for
> VDPAU is PCIe.  IMO, anything with PCIe in it is not "really old".

And to equal/exceed the capabilities of Ion2, a GT220 or higher is needed.
A lot of GT210 cards fall short for Advanced/2X, though perhaps some of the
newer superclocked ones might be good enough.

Here, I recently found a discarded Pentium-4 machine (Dell Optiplex GX280),
which despite the P4 CPU (3.00GHZ, hyperthread, 32-bit only) is actually
fairly decent.  Quiet fan, onboard SATA, and.. a PCIe 16X slot.

Not as pretty or as powerful as the Zotac Ion2 boxes I recommend/deploy,
but good enough for hi-def 1080p playback (with a fanless GT210 card)
and general computing.

That's the only P4 board I've come across with PCIe though,
and non-PCIe VDPAU cards seem to exist only in theory around here.

Cheers