On 08/05/2009 11:58 AM, Adam Sweet wrote:
I would 100% agree from my previous experience of Via motherboards and graphics chipsets. I used to have a Via SP13000 running my media PC performance was sluggish and horrible even from the supposedly 1.2ghz processor. The chipset drivers used to be a complete nightmare (even worse than now), but now openchrome drivers are included in a number of distros so you shouldn't have to worry about it, Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu all ship openchrome which should be fine.Brief summaries: John Wesley, Hardware + Mythbuntu: £425 processor: Via C7 memory: 1 Gb Hard Drive: 1.5 Tb Optical drive: None Graphics: VIA UniChromeTM Pro II 3D/2D AGP*snip* Without some research beforehand, I'd be very reluctant to use any Via graphics chips in what is essentially a video specific application. I'd be interested to hear others' experience of Via Chrome graphics chips if I'm wrong. Ad
MPEG2 playback on my system was with the openchrome driver and xvmc, but again hard to get working and playback quality wasn't great (my nvidia 6200 gives better xvmc playback by miles, and that isn't even a current card VDPAU on a Ion platform or similar is better still) but it did achieve the goal of smooth framerate and only 20% CPU usage for broadcast SD tv.
No MPEG4 support without using the via drivers, and I would agree that most people would tell you to avoid it if at all possible.
I think that a via system would be viable for SD content, but HD is probably beyond the hardware mentioned above. If you want HD an Nvidia ION system is probably the way to go.
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