[mythtv-users] hardware considerations: fast CPU vs nvidia/vdpau?

[Matt Garman]

On Sun, Jul 17, 2011 at 12:07:15PM -0700, Jason Long wrote:
> I've been happy using zotac atom/ion boards for FE with vdpau...
> Handles 1080p and 5.1 audio fine. Only ~15 watts idle, mini-itx,
> quiet, USB thumb drive for the OS, or a SSD. My backend has quad
> core for transcoding and commercial flagging and a redundant
> storage array for the data, so it uses up quite a bit more power.

Right, but my question is (cost aside) what's the advantage of an
atom+ion over e.g. an i3-2100 system?  They'll both have about the
same power consumption at idle, but the latter gives you a lot more
flexibility in terms of having a powerful general-purpose CPU,
rather than a weak CPU and an application-specific GPU.

And with the ion, you're messing with the proprietary nvidia drivers
(which, to their credit, are generally pretty painless to install)
and additional setup/configuration steps for making vdpau work.