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).