Hi all, Well, I've finally given up on my Epia frontend/backend. It worked reasonably well for about 8 months and I got TV and DVD playback to finally work, but it was a very flaky platform. About a week ago, I was trying to rip a DVD while watching TV at the same time, and it locked up (DMA bug is my best guess). On reboot, I found that there was something wrong with the superblock of the XFS partition where all my recordings were stored.
To make a long story short, when I tried to repair things, I screwed up the whole partition table and it no longer boots at all. Anyways, I don't want to bore you any more with my sad tales, but I do want to put out some warnings to potential Myth builders looking at the Epia platform. Like me, you will doubtless plunge in anyway, but at least you'll have a litte fore-warning. (My) Issues with the Epia: -------------------------- * Getting the Unichrome drivers to work could take a good amount of work. It may have gotten easier in the last few months, but I sure had a lot of trouble. If you're going for a trouble-free install of Linux/Myth, then the Epia is probably a bad idea. (Note: This is not a critique of the Unichrome drivers. I used them and loved them. It just took a lot of effort to get everything working.) * The Epia has a known issue with DMA. Check some of the postings at forums.viaarena.com I never had a problem when recording TV, but I definitely had a problem when transferring files over the LAN. If I tried to scp a file from my desktop to the Myth box, it would lock up hard in about 5 seconds. So, if you're hoping to use your Myth box as a media server (like I was), then Epia is definitely a bad idea. Again, this is personal experience backed up by others on the viaarena forums. YMMV * Many of the Epia MII boards have a bad PCMCIA slot (at least under Linux). When I plugged in my wireless card, dmesg would say that the slot refused to respond to requests to apply power to the card. I was able to find a workaround by using Linuxant's driverloader, but it was still a big hassle. * Getting the on-board temperature sensors and dynamic CPU clocking to work will take a kernel-recompile. At least it did the last time I checked. So, if you want the clock frequency to dynamically adjust to CPU load and/or temp, get ready for some work. * The slow speed leaves little headroom for mistakes and halfway kludges. By this I mean: with a fast system, you don't have to get everything working perfectly. Who cares about hardware decoding when you've got 2+ Ghz and software decoding barely registers on the CPU? I have a lot of respect for the people running the Epia ME6000s. If they can't get hardware decoding to work, then they're pretty much SOL. Besides, even if everything works, working with a slow machine can be quite painful. Try compiling a kernel 10 times on one of these things and you'll see what I mean. ----------------------- I guess my bottom line here is that getting an Epia/Linux system up and running can be a lot of work. Plus, in some cases (like the DMA issue), you may never find a solution. I finally got mine to work, but it was never 100%, and I was too afraid of screwing up what I had in order to tweak it more. So, if you're like me, and you just want a Myth box that works, take my advice and skip the Epia. I know a lot of people will disagree with me, and please feel free to voice your opinions. I just wanted to play devil's advocate for all the people out there that are eyeing the Epia as their Myth platform. They need to know that it will not be a cakewalk in order to get it set up. Now, let's just see if I sing this same tune after I've tried putting together a Myth box based around a AMD Sempron and an nForce-3 150 motherboard. Micah _______________________________________________ mythtv-users mailing list [email protected] http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
