[mythtv-users] Looking for reliable, inexpensive HD front end only box?

[Raymond Wagner]

drew einhorn wrote:
> There has been quite a bit of discussion of SD boxes, recently.
>
> But I'm thinking about building a HD box, and I was wondering
> about what folks are using for HD front ends these days.
>
>   

You don't ask a simple question.  There is a wide range of 'HD', 
requiring far varying amounts of power.

Lowly broadcast mpeg2 that can be decoded with any Athlon64 or Core2, as 
well as higher end P4s and AthlonXPs.  HDPVR output requires a very high 
clockrate processor.  Bluray/HDDVD and the high bitrate h264 DVB 
broadcasts require a very high clockrate dual core processor, or 
probably any quad core processor.

Then there is VDPAU for hardware decoding, and while this lets you get 
by with a comparatively simple machine, there are caveats.  It can only 
handle mpeg2, h264, and VC1.  XviD/DivX/mpeg4asp are not supported, 
although those are usually only used for standard definition content, 
and as such are fairly trivial to decode.  It is limited in levels and 
profiles of the codecs it does support, so if you have encoded something 
in h264 and have carelessly left set it to level 5.1, or used too many 
reference frames, or used macroblocks it did not like, you're out of 
luck.  It is not very robust in dealing with stream errors.  Newer 
drivers have improved this, but it still handles stream errors in 
recordings, or even some optical media, far less gracefully than libavcodec.