[mythtv-users] hardware considerations: fast CPU vs nvidia/vdpau?

jedi jedi at mishnet.org
Sat Jul 30 23:55:45 UTC 2011


On Sun, Jul 17, 2011 at 04:03:16PM -0500, Matt Garman wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 17, 2011 at 12:07:15PM -0700, Jason Long wrote:
> > I've been happy using zotac atom/ion boards for FE with vdpau...
> > Handles 1080p and 5.1 audio fine. Only ~15 watts idle, mini-itx,
> > quiet, USB thumb drive for the OS, or a SSD. My backend has quad
> > core for transcoding and commercial flagging and a redundant
> > storage array for the data, so it uses up quite a bit more power.
> 
> Right, but my question is (cost aside) what's the advantage of an
> atom+ion over e.g. an i3-2100 system?  They'll both have about the
> same power consumption at idle, but the latter gives you a lot more
> flexibility in terms of having a powerful general-purpose CPU,
> rather than a weak CPU and an application-specific GPU.
> 
> And with the ion, you're messing with the proprietary nvidia drivers
> (which, to their credit, are generally pretty painless to install)
> and additional setup/configuration steps for making vdpau work.

    Nvidia (and their blob driver) is still the best option even if
you aren't planning on using the GPU to play all of your video. That
sort of "overhead" is a bit of a constant regardless of what you decide
in terms of your CPU.

    Have any of the other xorg drivers improved (like intel) when it comes
to dealing with HDTVs? I would be curious to see if using a modern intel
embedded GPU is even an option with brute force decoding.


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