On 4/13/05, Ow Mun Heng <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Wed, 2005-04-13 at 18:02 -0400, Lucien D. wrote: > > Little update on what I said about the VIA mini-itx boards. Been > > looking at them a little. Thie via EPIA SP, one of their newest > > boards has a graphic processor with integrated MPEG-2 decoder and > > MPEG-4 accelerator, not 100% sure what that is. > > http://www.viaembedded.com/product/epia_sp_spec.jsp?motherboardId=261 > > > > Just bear in mind that the EPIA M10K at 1Ghz CPu does not have enough > grunt to do the PVR thingy. It does however play DVD and Divx fine with > ~ 20% for DVD and ~60-80% for Divx (CPU usage) > > So getting a haugepage is definately a need if you want to offload the > processing to do encoding >
On a related issue I'm concerned about noise. I was following links for the Epia SP main board and ran into this one: http://www.epiacenter.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=58 At the bottom of the page I find: "However, the cpu fan has not changed and is still the 25dba fan that has been used for a very long time. This is rather dissappointing considering the nearly silent Mini Mac recently announced - considering the low power CPU it seems a shame that the CPU cooling solution isn't drastically quieter. However, compared to some computers, which are normally 35dba or higher, the EPIA may seem quite quiet." Seems to me if one of these is going to sit in my Home Theater stack I want it silent, or as close to it as possible. It does raise the idea of using a Mac Mini running Gentoo to do some of this. Seems to me that the cost of the Mini-ITX mainboard, a case, memory, and some sort of hard drive is likely to approach $500, isn't it? Maybe I'm being pessimistic. I have a sound meter. Probably time to drag it out! - Mark -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
