I'm planning to get a MINI ITX system, probably a VIA EPIA 1ghz fanless or 1,5ghz with fan.

I'm not planning to record any shows, my only plan for this is to watch movies (DIVX or XVID) that are located on a WINXP shared HDD, so basically i believe that i dont need many power, but i want something that goes as smooth as possible on installation without any hassles.

probably 512mb DDR and 80GB HDD, i plan to install either knoppmyth or Mythbuntu, but to login directly on MYTHTV since i dont want to put either a keyboard or mouse, i will only add a remote control (probably MCE w/usb dongle)

My first plan is to get something like this:
http://cgi.ebay.com/EPIA-M-1-0Ghz-512MB ... 0249599115

plus a remote control (if there is any better than MCE please post it!)

thanks in advance

well, its seems that either is not recommended or anyone deal with this in the past...

Yeah, stay away from Via stuff would be my suggestion. Thought I read on the kmwiki that they are nothing but trouble... it may have been here. Sorry I don't have a reference for you.

You might also wanna think about a little more CPU horsepower if you plan to view x264 encoded videos. Divx/xvid doesn't need nearly as many CPU cycles to decode as x264 does. Also, consider the resolution of the vids. If they are SD (720x480 upscaled to 854x480) or HD (1280x720 or 1920x1024), this is make a huge difference roughly proportional to the area of each video.

In other words, if it takes 40 % of the CPU to decode a 346k pixels (SD) stream, it'll take roughly 2.7x as much CPU to decode 922k pixels (HD) stream (just multiply the vertical and horizontal resolutions to get the total pixels assuming the same frame rate).



Above are the CPU and memory usage data for my now 5-year-old myth box as captured by RRD Tool (included preconfigured in R5F27). The hardware specs are: Athlon 1900+ (1.60 GHz) and 512 meg of DDR memory (491 meg after the onboard 440MX steals 21 megs for the video).

Just for your reference, the usage on Sat was viewing 720x480 videos encoding with x264. Usage on Sun was first the same sized/formatted vid, but at 8:00, it was a 512x384 xvid file which as you can see used about 1/4 of the CPU to decode. As you can also see, 512 meg is enough for SDTV, at least on my system.

_________________
Retired KM user (R4 - R6.04); friend to LH users.

My 2nd option would be the following:

Motherboard: ASUS M2A-VM HDMI
Processor: Athlon 64 4800+ Dual Core
Mem: 1 gb DDR2
HDD: 160gb SATA
LG DVD-RW Drive


I think on this option because it has native video out through composite on the motherboard, so i dont need to buy an additional video card, the problem is that the case is a lot bigger than what i expected, and money also (would cost me around $350 here in Argentina)

Does anyone tried the system to boot up through the video output directly?

since i dont plan to add a keyboard to this, i need that this boots directly through composite video (i have a 20" Phillips TV on the bedroom)

Something like a Prismiq or MediaMVP will do the trick for you. I've used the Prismiq for just what you want - watching mpeg and divx/xvid stored on a windows pc, on an old TV. I'll sell you mine for $45 (box and remote and shipping to cont. US). PM me if you're interested.

I do have a Media MVP, but it sucks, it takes the subtitles randomly (.srt) never could find out why, also it makes out of sync on audio after you hit the pause button.

I'm also selling it if someone its interested, its not usable for subtitles movies.

You can get mini-ITX with an Intel Core-duo. I have seen some of these that are really good and will even handle 720p very well.

That could actually works!! do you know if they have Video Out through Composite or S-Video?

also, how much it cost it?