Le dimanche 24 juillet 2005 à 20:07 +0100, David Reynolds a écrit :

I'm thinking of getting a mini-itx system to run vdr on. The board I've been looking at is the VIA EPIA Nehemiah M10000 LVDS 1Ghz All In One Motherboard.

Anyone have any experience of doing this at all? Pros and cons?

VDR user #910

Any help or suggestions gratefully received.

Don't use Fedora Core 4 or 5 =:-D

LVDS is not supported by the Unichrome driver (the free one) or wasn't the last time I looked. Video out is limited to 1280 x 768 and VGA out -> VGA in on LCD/plasma TV is the best bet for quality. Some seem happy with s-video.

When running VDR 1.3.23, vdr-xine on Fedora Core 3 you will see about 10-12% CPU with unichrome r30. Later versions are using about 14-16% CPU which is still not bad considering the hardware involved. The later version has some support for SP13000 and mpeg4 and thus HDTV eventually (it may be the better choice for the future).

I have managed recording 4 streams while watching a 5th BBC channel.

Get a good power supply - I am managing OK with a 60W but do not have a DVD burner in the machine (I borrow an external firewire device from time to time). It won't work if room temperature (TV cabinet) goes over 35°C.

Cheers

Tony

Le lundi 25 juillet 2005 à 14:03 +0200, Pim Zandbergen a écrit :

You can also consider a mini-itx motherboard designed for the Pentium/Celeron M. This should give quite some more computing power and a cooler CPU as well..

Cooler??? Not if you are using unichrome mpeg2 HW acceleration and the CPU is running at 16%

And it should be able to run Fedora Core 4 just fine (not tested by me, though).

=:-D I do have my EPIA working but with VDR 1.3.26 - 1.3.23 was even better. It just took me a very long time to work around gcc4 and other changes.

But such a motherboard is more expensive than a VIA-based one.

From theregister "M 780 will sell to PC makers for around $637" an

SP13000 is 215 €... so _MUCH_ more expensive.

Tony

Le lundi 25 juillet 2005 à 15:37 +0200, Pim Zandbergen a écrit :

Let's not exaggerate.

My favorite machine is Celeron powered

The DFI G5M100-N is under € 250 A Celeron M 1.3 GHz is under € 100

You don't need a Pentium M for VDR, the Celeron M is quite a powerful CPU, probably more powerful than any VIA Epia CPU.

And will it play HDTV streams at 1.3 Ghz? Without hw acceleration my VIA M10000 is used at 60-80% on live TV or DVD playback. OK it is not a Celeron but I have seen Celeron M usage figures for mpeg2 playback over 50% CPU. What happens when you have other processus running (vdradmin and epg scan springs to mind)?

When you max out a M10000 it gets hot. I would not want a machine using over 50% CPU on a regular basis in a cabinet under my TV... VIA may be what it is but one thing going for them is HW mpeg2 acceleration.

Cheers

Tony

Niko Mikkila nm@phnet.fi wrote:

Since european HDTV transmissions will be based on MPEG4 AVC, I wouldn't base my CPU choice on HDTV playback capabilities. H.264 decoding at 1920x1080 seems to require a very fast dual core processor or two single-core ones. So in any case

Good hint! From your perspective, is there anything on the horizon that is capable of doing this and save some energy? Would an Athlon64 X2 3800+ running with cool'n'quiet be a proper choice? This seems cheaper than a dual CPU mainboard...

Ooops - my poor little Epia5000... guess it's going to be converted to a thin client then.

On Tue, 26 Jul 2005 08:10:26 +0200 (CEST) Harald Milz wrote:

Good hint! From your perspective, is there anything on the horizon that is capable of doing this and save some energy? Would an Athlon64 X2 3800+ running with cool'n'quiet be a proper choice? This seems cheaper than a dual CPU mainboard...

The latest and greatest GPUs from nVidia have already some kind of acceleration for MPEG4 AVC, and hopefully they'll provide some driver support for Linux and *BSD as well. Also Sigma will probably provide decoder chips within a few months. I guess we'll need hardware decoding or at least decoding assistance at first -- just like for current MPEG2 HDTV streams.

A fast Athlon64 might work, but cool'n'quiet would be of no use because decoding would take most of the available CPU resources.

--Niko

Niko Mikkila wrote:

On Tue, 26 Jul 2005 08:10:26 +0200 (CEST) Harald Milz wrote:

...

Good hint! From your perspective, is there anything on the horizon that is capable of doing this and save some energy? Would an Athlon64 X2 3800+ running with cool'n'quiet be a proper choice? This seems cheaper than a dual CPU mainboard...

The latest and greatest GPUs from nVidia have already some kind of acceleration for MPEG4 AVC, and hopefully they'll provide some driver support for Linux and *BSD as well.

Does anyone know the capabilities of the new VIA-cards, SP and DP with Unichrome Pro, when it comes to playing MPEG 2 & 4? I've never seen any information on what resolutions and bitrates they can handle.

-- Anders