<html><body><div style="color:#000; background-color:#fff; font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:10pt"><div><deletia><br></div><div>> I've seen FFMPEG crash on good data and on bad data that hardware decoders<br></div><div>> just breezed through. I've also seen the reverse. The only advantage software<br></div><div>> decoding offers *right now* is the ability to patch it to deal with such <br></div><div>> situations. I happen to know a 1.8GHz processor can software decode at least<br></div><div>> 720p video, and some 1080i MPEG2. For my use, I know I'm covered with the<br></div><div>> lower processing power. I expect the system to last 2 years as a front end.<br></div><div>> I haven't seen the hardware requirements for MythTV significantly change<br></div><div>> since before the introduction of VDPAU and the abandonment of XvMC. <br><br></div><div style="font-family:
arial,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><div style="font-family: times new roman,new york,times,serif; font-size: 12pt;">When I bought my first Mythtv box (a BE/FE fullsize tower), I didn't know enough about what I should be getting and VDPAU had just begun (at least to me) so I ended up buying a motherboard with onboard *intel* hdmi and I put an Intel core2duo 3.0GHz CPU on it with 4GB ram (and several TB HDDs).<br><br>At firsft I was using the CPU decoding for H.264 1080i stuff and was pinning one, if not both cores (can't remember) at 100% leaving little room for things like commflagging to run. Needless to say the box was responding quite sluggishly while watching recordings or liveTV. I then decided to get an NVidia GT220 to be able to use VDPAU instead. Now the CPU can be tasked to other things than just rendering the video.<br><br>3.0GHz core2duos might not be considered "fast" anymore but still, they aren't exactly underpowered...<br><br>I
have an original Acer Ion box (hypertheading single core) as a separate frontend playing my H.264 1080i stuff on a bedroom 720p TV and it works "well enough" for now, it's hidden behind the dresser so it gets high WAF. The day that it can't fulfill its mission as a small FE, well then, it'll just turn into another one of my pet project toys (I've got boxes of old hardware, Buffalo NASes, IDE HDDs, nics, usb cards, etc...)<br><br>To me, this is the nature of the hobby. Buying something that lasts forever is just plain boring! ;-)<br><br>Daniel<br><br></div></div></div></body></html>