Wednesday, February 18, 2009

VDPAU hopes

The hottest topic on the MythTV users list right now is the VDPAU patches that are being worked on (or submitted actually). It seems that with a recent NVidia card, you could offload some of the workload of decoding to the GPU, thus saving CPU cycles. This is a very hot topic in computing right now, with the OpenCL inclusion in Snow Leopard and all... and for HTPCs it makse so much sense! Why have a very big CPU (and the huge fan for it) working overtime when some of the work could be done by processor made basically for computer graphics computations?

Me, however, I was not immediatelly not convinced that this would be a good solution for me, since I thought it would add the requirements of a second heavilly cooled processor to the box, and thus increasing noise. However, it seems that the G8 NVidia chips are available on more than a few motheboards as a built-in graphics solution. When upgrading, I will have to get med one of those... :-)

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Tuesday, February 17, 2009

MythTV revisited..

After had MythTV up and running now for a year, I have decided it is time for an upgrade of hardware. The box is really not quiet. Even in a cupboardlike the one I have, you can easilly hear the fan.. and the eletric bill ticking away :-). The current CPU is an old Athlon 2600 with no CPU frequency throtteling at all, so I would like to move to a new CPU. Also, I would like to be able to have it available more of the time, without having to wait for the long startup sequence to complete.

Thus, my plans are to:

1) Move to a 64 bit Athlon with speedstep. Possibly with a couple of cores :-)

2) Find a combination of HW that will allow me to use suspend to ram or similar features.

I am away from Sweden right now, so getting these things will have to wait until summer.