Which ITX board??

[nkh]

wow, how cool is that!

It's amazing that places like linitx.com and mini-itx.com haven't picked up on thoes boards...

[nkh]

oh: http://linuxdevices.com/news/NS7620458175.html, "Without processor or RAM, suggested retail for the board is €379.

[stmok]

Didn't I say it was expensive?

[pidge]

I've got a EPIA 800 at the moment just for *cough*divX*cough* and DVD playback through an Xcard, and it's OK apart from the #### lockups on DVD playback. Maybe I should to replace the noisy CPU fan.... However, I'd love to use that with a PVR card as well BUT I don't have one of the mini-itx cases which support 2-PCI slots - and the one case I know of, you either need to use a notebook drive (expensive and low capacity) or a low profile drive i.e. a maxtor which will be similar capacity and noisy *sigh*. Oh, and nobody in New Zealand sells them...

Consider these bits:
Pro-case CS-100 case
Black DVD Drive (perhaps DVD+-RW).
Leadtek K7NCR18GM
Athlon XP 2500+ or faster
Two sticks of 256MB PC3200 DDR RAM

The Procase CS-100, lying on its left side, the DVD drive is "mid mounted".

The Leadtek K7NCR18GM has TV-Out onboard, and is an nForce 2 Chipset, which is recommend for the Hauppauge PVR350/PV250 cards. $195 - $205 - about the same as a decent KM400 based MATX board with a AGP card with TV out - and draws less power (so less PSU noise...)

An Athlon XP 2500+ or faster, and underclock (FSB down from 166/333 to 133/266 or even 100/200) to cut the power draw of the chip - or a Sempron with its PowerNow thingy similarly underclocked.... A Duron may do just as nicely though. And undervolt if the motherboard will let me. (even less power! and less CPU fan noise needed)

Oh well, I'll save my pennies for the moment...

And wait for someone to crack the problem of the PVR2000 (Got static so far, no tuning ). I may have another go some time... or breakdown and get a PVR250.

Anybody wanting to buy a hardly used PVR2000?

[chockymonster]

Quote[/b] (web_maven @ Sep. 13 2004,10:26)]I am about to use the EPIA M9000 900Mhz and was looking at the PVR250 the only problem is MPEG2 decoding (It does not have it) which other people are use the Xcard (for video out and Mpeg2 decoding).  The only problem is everything that goes out except for video is 256 colors like pictures and the OSD.  

As far as I was aware, the pvr-250 has hardware encoding.
It's plastered all over hauppage's website as having the functionality, it's all over the box.

Surely it must have it? otherwise that's a blatant case of misadvertising!!!
There is no way I can run it on the 800, doing anything on the box with regards to capturing using pvr-250 gives me a great quality capture, sound is perfect but I don't think the box has the horsepower to deal with writing the video at the rate needed. Hence on longer captures I get jerky frames but perfect audio.

[chockymonster]

I am leaning towards the MII-12000, I'm just really nervous about throwing more money at something and wasting it.
At the moment I'm stuck with my Morex Venus case which has 2 pci slots, but they aren't both usable as they are vertical, not horizontal so I can't use a riser.

I don't want to get a dremel to the back of the case and I don't have the time to make a case out of some sticky back plastic and washing up bottles just to earn a blue peter badge

It doesn't help that I've got 2 opposite camps giving me 2 answers that contradict each other! One saying go P4, the board is quiet with a celeron and the MII-12000 is too slow, or the others that say the MII-12000 will do the job and the P4 with a celery is too noisy.

It all leaves me a bit confused!

[nkh]

just to make you even more confused I'll tell you what I'm using

M10000 (usualy running @ 1066mhz) with 256mb ram, pvr350 and a geforce4 mx440 (64mb/pci), in a wood case. I usualy have a browser (avant browser with 5-10 tabs open) and mIrc running all the time (on the monitor) and gbpvr running on the tv (dual screen setting on the geforce card). I capture video in mpeg2 at about 2500kbps, it runs smoothly on the tv but sometimes it stutters a bit when you bring the osd up also, the menus can be a bit sluggish if the computer hasn't been rebooted in a couple of days. It playes divx through gbpvr fine.

Everything runs smoothly if GBpvr is the only thing that's open on the computer and it runs even better if I use the tv-out on the pvr350. Also, I haven't got any problems at all with loosing frames when recording even if I play games on the computer or have it reencoding video, the only time I have had dropped frames was when one of my harddrives lost power....

[chockymonster]

Ah sod it!

Ordered the MII-12000 today, will have a play with it tomorrow and see what it can do. Got some ideas with regards to the 800 board. I may well get out the dremel and work out what I can house it in.
TV in the bedroom using wireless. Sounds like a project

[chockymonster]

Well,
the board has arrived, all nicely built, looking really really nice.
Did a test record of Carnivale and played it on my pc and I still get audiosync problems and bad video quality

I get to the point that I'm ready to throw the #### thing out of the window after trying to reinstall this that and the other. Go back upstairs to try playing a recorded file again only to find that my wife is selfishly using my pc to play sims 2

Copy the video to her pc and it plays absolutely fine, perfect audio synch, all looks good, fantastic quality. But on my pc it looks like a sack of poo How bizarre! I'm assuming it's a codec issue? Why are codecs such a pain in the neck?

[sub]

Yes, there is quite a bit of difference between the different codecs. I found on my M10000 that video worked best using the Cyberlink decoder (from PowerDVD5), as it was able to using the EPIA's onboard hardware MPEG2 decoder features.

I also saw this earlier today that I wasn't aware of: http://forums.sudhian.com/message....hread=y