[mythtv-users] Lowest power HD frontend?

John Morris jmorris at beau.org
Wed Jun 5 21:44:36 UTC 2013


On Tue, 2013-06-04 at 10:50 +0800, James Linder wrote:
> On 03/06/2013, at 8:00 PM, mythtv-users-request at mythtv.org wrote:
> 
> >>> I guess I am a bit disappointed we don't have <<10 watt machines 
> >>> today that can do all this easily.  The first ION stuff came out 4 
> >>> years ago and Moore's law should have solved this by now. :)

It is a problem using Intel CPUs and PC video boards.  Most current
phones can do 1080p decode now and they can do it for several hours on a
battery with only a couple of Watt/Hours of energy; that is for control,
decode, display + backlight, audio and the whole ball of wax.  In other
words, a complete HD viewer can consume around a watt with shipping 2013
level tech.

Yet no 'PC' style machine, no matter the price, silent or loud, can
manage to run a Myth frontend without consuming several watts just for
the compute portion, no display, audio, etc.  Forget playing video, you
would be hard pressed to get an Intel solution to idle at 1W, even
suspended power drain is often more than 1W.  Heck, S5 powered down byt
watching the network or keyboard for events usually draws more than 1W.
I doubt you could build a PC that doesn't waste a watt in the power
supply alone.

The answer is to get a good stable Linux port with fully accelerated
video onto one of the little ARM boxes that normally ship with Android
and then get Mythfrontend running on that.  If Mythfrontend ever gets so
big that it can't run well on a quadcore and 2GB ram things have totally
went off the rails.  :)

If using a hardware encoder/tuner (a HD Homerun, or comparable) I can't
see why one of the little ARM boxes with SATA couldn't host a combined
FE/BE system complete with MythWeb.  Transcoding might not be too
practical and even commercial detection might be a problem.  Would be an
interesting experiment though.

TVs are getting enough grunt in them that we might want to just put the
frontend there.  Of course all the new sets with lots of CPU also lock
the bootloader because the reason for the beefy CPU is to load it up
with players for as many subscription streaming services that the
manufacturer can sign deals with.  Bleh.
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