ainvar wrote:
I haven't used any of the newer EPIA board, but I do use an EPIA-800 (in a fanless shoebox case) as our home media center PC. I find that it is great for SD divx stuff but it's a little slow for DVD playback (from 5 to 20 fps).
That said, it looks like your board has a much faster CPU (and I believe it's at least one generation newer, too), so at that point, I would be wondering what software you would be using for playback. I use Geexbox as it is a very small Linux based distro that basically contains mplayer, samba, wireless utilities, and all the drivers you might need. It will usually fit under 15Mb, and as such it is perfect for putting on a small flash based disk. There is also Freepia for newer EPIA boards that looks very slick, and my understanding is that it runs rather well, too.
Worse comes to worse, I'm sure you could drop in a PCI video card that would greatly improve your compressed video playback performance. I know that there are a few cards dedicated to just that thing, but almost any graphics card should have better performance than the builtin unichrome device, even if it is just PCI.
I say play around with software first, before buying any hardware. See what kind of performance you can get out of various things. Little projects like this are always fun! Good luck!
Thank you for your reply! I am using an EPIA PD 10000 board (C3 at 1 GHz) right now and DVD playback is very good, because Windows software like Cyberlink PowerDVD can use hardware decoding functions of the chipset. The EX boards should come (as specified) with hardware support for mpeg2/mpeg4/divx/wmv and stated HD compatibility. I would really like to know if anybody has really succeeded in playing a 720p or higher resolution clip with the hardware.
I was thinking about running Linux on that system and support should be good. The PD runs fine but is used mainly as a mini server. I wonder how the media stuff would work. Video playback would only make sense if hardware support of the graphics chipset is supported. The power saving does not even work fully with Windows XP but requires Vista (not appreciated) for chancing clock frequency quickly on the fly.
Anybody with related experiences is higly welcomed to share those!
22 Aug 2007, 8:32 am
