Via Launches a New Mini-ITX System 162
primesuspect writes "Coming in close to the 10th anniversary of the format and billed as a 'motherboard for digital home media DIY enthusiasts,' VIA have paired their Nano X2 1.4ghz dual-core CPU with their VX900 chipset to produce an intriguing addition to their mini-ITX lineup." Mini-ITX, to my pleasure, has never gone completely away: witness the (slow, but not stopped) flow of news at Mini-ITX.com.
Re:VIA? fantastic! (Score:5, Interesting)
What chipset problems have already been identified? What else is likely to go wrong?
I keep thinking of building a "media center[sic]" computer with TV card but there always seems to be some horrible flaw in any setup I consider. Is there an exception yet?
I'm guessing the VIA failmode is it doesn't support VDPAU. VDPAU offloads video codec decoding to the video card, so probably a pentium-75 could play 1080p as long as its got a good enough card.
Get a zotac zbox with nvidia onboard card. Talk about a boring install, compared to ye olden days. Open the box, stick in a small silent SSD (I'm using less than 4 gigs at this time). I believe I stuck 2 gigs ram in there too. Set up for Debian netboot, which in my case was enable ethernet boot on the zbox, add it's mac to DHCP and friends, boot and install plain vanilla Debian. Reconfigure the zbox to stop netbooting and boot off its internal drive. Install NVIDIA drivers, add the debian multimedia repository, apt-get install the stuff you need for a mythtv FE, modify the files necessary to auto-log-you-in-and-dump-you-into-mythtv and you're done. Configure mythtv in "config" "setup" "tv" and have it use vdpau for all playback. I believe I burned about two hours on it from cutting the cardboard box open to watching TV recordings. It helps that I've automated all the system-wide config work in Puppet, I had to manually install the nvidia drivers but stuff like my ratpoison and autologin and all that was all handled by the Puppet. This was circa 6 months ago times may have changed.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)