Paul Menzel a écrit :
> there has been some talk about the new ION chipset from NVIDIA on this
> list [1]. Intel also published a board which is said to be very
> promising for SD (standard definition) material [2] (at least with the
> FRC (frame rate control) patches [3].

This boards seems cool, but anything "new" without HD video decoding is 
not enough these times.
Pros :
* 12V power supply input (I hope all the manufacturers will soon agree 
on some internal/external connector standard, and we will see plenty of 
efficient power bricks)
* very few external port, specially getting rid of useless things (PS2, 
all the analog audio jacks, etc.)

> So what about the VIA VX855 chipset [4] as the basis for a multimedia
> platform? VIA publishes the docs and it looks like it will even be
> supported by coreboot [5][6].

EPIA M boards were supported by coreboot since a very long time 
(CLE266). That's a good point, but I never jumped into it...

The real problem is that the XvMC and further HD video decoding are not 
really supported by VIA. I follow the openchrome-devel ML since some 
time now (http://wiki.openchrome.org/pipermail/openchrome-devel/), and 
it seems VIA is still waiting for legal advice before fully releasing 
MPEG2/4 documentation for their chips.
MPEG4 does not work on any VIA chip, and MEPG2 is only supported on the 
older ones.

> I know it depends on what you need (SD or HD and so on). But I searched
> for »vx855 vdr«, »vx855 xbmc«, »vx855 mythtv« on the WWW and did not get
> meaningfull results. Or is the problem, that there are no boards
> available yet?

There are or will be good EPIA boards with this chip. The problem is 
that I do not trust VIA to release enough documentation quickly enough 
to attract users (me).
I now personnaly see ION as the platform of choice for video (VDR). I 
thought VIA could have become a good challenger, but it seems they do 
not want to...

My latest experience with VIA was that the IDE silicon on many chips is 
broken since many years, and freeze the whole system. I had random 
freezes on my EPIA EK8000 server (uptime from 1 day to 5 months), more 
or less depending on various kernels, load, other devices, etc.. Until I 
decided to really dig into this, and replace the IDE drives with SATA 
drives. As of now, no more freezes.
All this to say that I do not trust VIA anymore, even though I have 2 
diskless VDRs based on CLE266 (which work wonderfully, except for 
deinterlacing on progressive device, since my last upgrade).

-- 
NH

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