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| Mini itx boards? http://forum.linhes.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=14407 |
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| Author: | Daved [ Thu Mar 01, 2007 9:46 am ] |
| Post subject: | Mini itx boards? |
I am looking to set up a frontend using a mini itx board. I have been looking at the EPIA EN15000G. Is this a good board, or is there a better one out there. The system will be mainly doing SDTV but maybe some HDTV later on. Thanks |
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| Author: | mogator88 [ Thu Mar 01, 2007 10:52 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Looks like it only has s-video out |
The TV out looks like a regular S-video, not the kind that can be converted to component out for "true" HD. Some TV's have a firewire connection, but you'll have to do a little digging to see if that will work with Myth. You may have to use the monitor out to connect to your TV for best resolution. Only one expansion slot may limit you as well if you need to put in a video card. This may be an issue because most of the talk here is that you need a top speed CPU if you're doing HD without a graphics card. I just looked at logicsupply.com who sells the board you're looking at and some nice small cases. Seems like it could make a nice diskless front end. Hmmmm..... FWIW, I used an Antec nsk2400 case, takes micro ATX boards. Its about twice as tall as a typical video component, but I had no hassles assembling the insides, lots of hardware choices. Looks great too. Good luck and keep us posted. |
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| Author: | tuatara [ Thu Mar 01, 2007 11:20 pm ] |
| Post subject: | unichrome will be the problem |
Your problem will be with unichrome http://unichrome.sourceforge.net/. The EN15000G includes a VT3344 encoder inside the CN700 northbridge (according to the unichrome site and here: http://www.logicsupply.com/product_info.php/products_id/545). Unichrome does not support the CN700 yet. In which case you will be relying on unaccelerated video output. I have an EPIA MII12000, and without the CLE266 northbridge, my CPU struggles to generate SD tv. With XvMC support on the Via (which uses Unichrome to accelerate display via the CLE266) I'm at 20-40% during playback. Dont except to be able to output HD. Is this clear? Its end of day and I've a wine (the red kind, not the s/w kind) and its probably a bad time for me to type coherently. Cheers. |
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| Author: | Dale [ Fri Mar 02, 2007 1:55 am ] |
| Post subject: | |
I've got one of those boards. We had used it as a demo at this year's SCALE. It does SD well, but we haven't yet got it to do real HDTV. |
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| Author: | Daved [ Fri Mar 02, 2007 8:38 am ] |
| Post subject: | |
Thanks for the replies. I just pressed the order button, so I will give an update and review when I get it. |
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| Author: | bburtin [ Fri Mar 02, 2007 2:31 pm ] |
| Post subject: | |
I've had mixed luck with my EPIA-M10000 board. The cool thing is that TV out is enabled at the board level. It was really easy to get the thing up and running with KnoppMyth. Just turn on TV-out in the BIOS, boot up your system and the TV-out is on right from the boot screen. That's the good news. Now here's the bad news. The TV-out quality on the board is pretty weak. I saw a noticeable quality degradation when I switched from the PVR-350 TV-out to the EPIA. I then tried switching on the TV-out on the PVR-350 and my system wouldn't boot. I haven't taken the time to thoroughly investigate and figure out what's going wrong, because I still have MythTV running on my old box. I'm also looking to get a new LCD TV which would have VGA in and would get me around all the Linux TV-out silliness. I'd be curious to hear how things go with your setup. Boris |
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| Author: | akulcsar [ Fri Mar 02, 2007 4:05 pm ] |
| Post subject: | |
KnoppMyth R5D1 came with the OpenChrome drivers for Via's Unichrome chipsets, which does support the CN700 chipset. According to their documentation, though, the only Unichrome chipset that is capable of delivering HDTV is the CN400 chipset and its cousins. Via's only Mini-ITX board that uses that chipset is the SP series. Their Nano-ITX boards in the N series also feature the CN400 chipset. The CN700 chipset, along with every other Via chipset for the Mini-ITX boards, tops out at 1024x1024 for native MPEG-2 decoding. I am getting some mixed information from my X logs, but R5E30 also should come with the OpenChrome drivers. I think I just have a goofed-up configuration on my test machine. I have two units with the M10000 board, and I have had no problems with the S-Video function. The xorg.conf file (and sometimes the XvMCConfig file) needs tweaking sometimes, but otherwise it works out-of-the-box. I have been very happy with them. |
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| Author: | tuatara [ Fri Mar 02, 2007 11:22 pm ] |
| Post subject: | |
Awesome! I thought we were still with unichrome. To the original poster... If you go the EPIA/VIA/M-ITX route (which I did), here's some notes on processing: - you can make it *really* silent, which is important. ** - you dont have a lot of processing power available (1GHz Via is apparently about equiv to 800MHz Pentium). But you can move data around pretty quickly. - The result is that in all choices, unload the processor. - RIP dvd's using 'Perfect' or ISO (i.e. raw dumps). You dont have the processing power to transcode. Uses more space - Dont transcode TV programs. Just dump best possible from the encoder card (2GB/hr). - You can't use MythStreamTV if it attempt to transcode on the fly. I haven't got this working yet, but when I stream the raw mpg files over the home LAN, I can watch them remotely. - I can't play back many non-MPEG2 streams, so everythings got to be MPEG2. - I can run 2 encoder cards @ 2GB/hour each with almost no CPU loading. - Adstripping takes quite a while - I do that in the wee hours. Good luck. Cheers. Paul ** I can't understand how people are running these dual 3GHz power machines with high spec video and 3 or 4 fans in their living room. The noise is distracting. Two guys I know who did this both spent a lot of time and trouble trying to quieten it down. |
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| Author: | bburtin [ Sat Mar 03, 2007 10:32 am ] |
| Post subject: | |
Can someone please shed some more light on OpenChrome? From what I gather, it's a video driver, used to get maximum performance from the VIA graphics chip. Am I understanding this correctly? Would OpenChrome have any effect on TV-out quality on the EPIA boards? |
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| Author: | tuatara [ Sun Mar 04, 2007 10:33 pm ] |
| Post subject: | |
Here's my understanding. You are right - OpenChrome is a video driver for the Via Unichrome chipsets. The cool thing that OpenChrome (and Unichrome) provide is that they enable the Mpeg 2 (and 4 in later chipsets) decoder built into the Via Unichrome chips (CLE266, CN400, ...). In other words, the chips provide hardware acceleration and {Open,uni}chrome makes use of that. When playing back Mpeg2 without OpenChrome, CPU utilization is very high on my MII12000 (1.2GHz Via Nehemiah CPU). With openchrome it drops to 20-40% (in fact it used to be lower - not sure what's going with E50 yet). As to quality - its pretty good but the PVR-350 is better (it also includes an MPEG 2 decoder). Cheers. Paul bburtin wrote: Can someone please shed some more light on OpenChrome? From what I gather, it's a video driver, used to get maximum performance from the VIA graphics chip. Am I understanding this correctly? Would OpenChrome have any effect on TV-out quality on the EPIA boards?
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| Author: | bburtin [ Mon Mar 05, 2007 11:16 am ] |
| Post subject: | |
Paul, thanks for your response. Are you able to watch HD MPEG2 streams? I tried watching some of the streams I recorded with my Air2PC card and it can't keep up. You'd think that the hardware decoder on the EPIA boards (M10000 in my case) would be able to handle it. |
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| Author: | akulcsar [ Mon Mar 05, 2007 7:00 pm ] |
| Post subject: | |
bburtin: Scroll up and re-read my post...there is a hardware limitation with the CLE266 chipset (included in the M10000, among many other Via Mini-ITX boards) that will not allow it to use hardware acceleration with HDTV streams. My M10000 boxes handle SDTV digital streams just fine, though. |
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| Author: | Daved [ Fri Mar 09, 2007 6:30 pm ] |
| Post subject: | |
Little Update... I finally got my Epia EN15000g, unfortunately, I only received 256mb of ram. Since it's useless as a frontend with such little memory, I put debian on it and it worked great. More memory is on the way. I will post my results when it arrives. |
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