New Zealand
I thought others might find this interesting.
I've semi successfully got Media Portal running on a VIA EPIA EX1000EG Board,
I would not recommend VIA for an HTPC, they are silent and draw almost no power, but the drivers & support from via are non existent and they are frustratingly slow & quite unstable.
Spec is as follows:
VIA EPIA EX Mainboard, with a fanless 1ghz C7 chip on a CN700/M2 chipset. This board has WMV9 & MPEG2/4 hardware decoding, wether the drivers actually make use of the hardware decoding is anyones guess.
With 1gb ram & an old Western Digital 320gb SATA1 drive ( which is the only source of noise in the whole system ), plus a hauppauge Nova-T-500 Dual tuner dvb card.
Everything works flawlessly except TV playback, which 'almost' works:
Playback with the default codecs resulted in artifacts during any sort of quick motion on screen.
Recording works fine, and oddly recorded tv plays back flawlessly, no artifacts at all.
Changing all the default codecs with the ones installed by Cyberlink Powerdvd ( I read somewhere that this codec had hardware decoding enabled for the EPIA's chipset ) results in smooth playback fullscreen with no artifacts, but artifacts reappear when the tv window is in a window while navigating menus.
Oddly, when I only changed the video codec to cyberlink things got way worse, it was when I changed the sound codec as-well that playback started to work properly, so it might be that the sound renderer was eating up all my cpu? I need to experiment some more with that.
It doesn't fast forward or rewind very well, and so far I've seen one blue screen.
So yeah, the minimum requirements can be bent a little I guess.
I've semi successfully got Media Portal running on a VIA EPIA EX1000EG Board,
I would not recommend VIA for an HTPC, they are silent and draw almost no power, but the drivers & support from via are non existent and they are frustratingly slow & quite unstable.
Spec is as follows:
VIA EPIA EX Mainboard, with a fanless 1ghz C7 chip on a CN700/M2 chipset. This board has WMV9 & MPEG2/4 hardware decoding, wether the drivers actually make use of the hardware decoding is anyones guess.
With 1gb ram & an old Western Digital 320gb SATA1 drive ( which is the only source of noise in the whole system ), plus a hauppauge Nova-T-500 Dual tuner dvb card.
Everything works flawlessly except TV playback, which 'almost' works:
Playback with the default codecs resulted in artifacts during any sort of quick motion on screen.
Recording works fine, and oddly recorded tv plays back flawlessly, no artifacts at all.
Changing all the default codecs with the ones installed by Cyberlink Powerdvd ( I read somewhere that this codec had hardware decoding enabled for the EPIA's chipset ) results in smooth playback fullscreen with no artifacts, but artifacts reappear when the tv window is in a window while navigating menus.
Oddly, when I only changed the video codec to cyberlink things got way worse, it was when I changed the sound codec as-well that playback started to work properly, so it might be that the sound renderer was eating up all my cpu? I need to experiment some more with that.
It doesn't fast forward or rewind very well, and so far I've seen one blue screen.
So yeah, the minimum requirements can be bent a little I guess.