[mythtv-users] Lowest power HD frontend?

[Gary Buhrmaster]

On Wed, Jun 5, 2013 at 11:25 PM, Joseph Fry <joe at thefrys.com> wrote:
...
> I wonder if any of these would fit the bill:
> http://dx.com/c/consumer-electronics-199/hd-media-players-103/android-hd-players-191.
> I know Ubuntu will install on some android phones/devices... though I'm not
> sure how it would work on these.

Some thoughts:

- Few of these ARM devices can do hardware temporial/spatial
  de-interlacing.  Interlaced content is common on many
  locations.  None of the ARM devices with their limited
  capability decoders (that I am aware of) can do High
  Def content temporal/spatial de-interlacing in software.
  That may be fine on a 4" screen, where either low
  resolution bob/weave can be acceptable (or even throwing
  away every other frame), but is may not be acceptable on
  that 65" OLED (your tolerance to low quality will vary)

- Some of the hardware decoders have no linux driver
  support.

- Most of the TV's mentioned have dedicate hardware
  decoders (and post processing HW), without the
  additional overhead of all the GPU that nVidia
  offers (when doing just decode, only a small
  dedicated part of the GPU chip is being used,
  although as implemented by nVidia, the GPU is
  used for deinterlacing, so one ends up needing a
  powerful GPU).  There are chips available on the
  market for hardware decode and encode (and
  would make great small, cheap, low power
  transcoders) with advanced de-interlacing capability.
  Those chips are often used in dedicated solutions,
  including TVs.  Note that there are also some
  FPGA cores available if you are into build your
  own FPGA solution (probably not scalable).

- Alternatives are to transcode all content to
  progressive (either immediately at capture,
  or post-processing).  In any transcode, there
  will be some quality loss, some of the time,
  and some people will find that unacceptable,
  or will not be happy about the time or resources
  needed on the transcoding host.

- Mythfrontend has a lot of capabilities that simply
  require a lot of processing power.  That means
  large(r), and needing more resources.  While it
  certainly could be slimmed down, one would first
  have to agree on what one should throw out.
  That might be an interesting conversation to
  start.  What features should a frontend have?
  Clearly (from other posts) some find the XBMC
  feature set adequate.  While some others
  want more and more features added to the
  frontend.  Can the community agree on what
  features you want to deprecate, or what content
  types you are willing to abandon.