I built a couple of diskless frontends about 4 years ago and one has now quit working for me. So I am looking to built a new one but things have changed a lot since then. I have a Ruku box and would like something like that or the Apple tv size. Does anyone know what parts are in one of them or have any ideas for building something that same to do STD and HD?


Thanks

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Marty

Long live Myth and Knoppmyth!!!!!

check out the new Intel dual core atom 330

$96 -> http://www.logicsupply.com/products/boxd945gclf2

Seems to handle all 720p content that I have tossed at it under XBMC, Knoppmyth performance should be similar.

Unfortunately, the above ref is VGA out only but the MB does support a PCI interface so maybe it with a nvidia PCI video card with DVI out might work well. It's on my list to try out.

It sounds a bit shady that you have to pay an optional extra 15% if you want a board that's not defective...

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Grant

That's just how logicsupply keeps the returns down and %15 of $96 is less than $15.

If you don't like it, numerous other vendors also handle this same board :)

Any idea if it can handle 1080i content that needs to be deinterlaced?

would that be 1080i in mpeg2 or mpeg4? It makes a big difference.

Since I can almost do 1080i mpeg2 with a 1GHz AppleTV, The dual core 1.6 GHz atom 330 should be fine with mpeg2.

I'm asking about mpeg2. I'm not sure if AppleTV is a proof point -- they may have hardware mepg2 decoding assisting the CPU...

Marc

As Mr AppleTV, I should know :)

1080i mpeg is easy on the AppleTV using XvMC.

My "almost" data point is via XBMC for Mac on native AppleTV OS. Pure cpu here.

data point for the dual-core atom 330 is XBMC for Linux (XBMC Live on a USB flash drive), also pure cpu.

I just ran a test. 1080i on my intel E8400-based system (3 ghz core-2 duo) runs at 80% idle => ~40% of one 3.0ghz core, so you're right -- 1.6 ghz dual core should be quite sufficient. This is really interesting.

Any idea how much power that setup draws and any pointers to a nice case?

Marc

Intel's Atom is not simply an underclocked Core 2. For one thing it's not actually dual core, it's one core that is hyperthreaded. Other differences in cache, memory prefetchers and ability to process multiple operations per clock can make mean you can't just scale the Ghz rating.

More on the Atom from Tom's Hardware

That's the Atom 230. From what I was able to read, the Atom 330 is dual core. Having said this, your point about not being a simple, linear scaling is a good one. My reason for optimism that it has enough processing power is davilla's observation that a 1ghz single-core Atom is "almost enough" in combination with the scaling exercise.

At this point, there are two reasons why I hesitate on using this setup:

1. Integrated GMA 950 graphics -- I have seen several posts where people struggle to get them to work well under Knoppmyth. If anyone has gotten the integrated Intel GMA 950 graphics to work well under Knoppmyth, I would be very interested in hearing about it.

2. Power consumption. According to Tom's hardware, total power consumption is still high -- 49 watts idle; 59 watts full load. The issue isn't the CPU power draw -- its the rest of the chip set. If I removed the 3 tuners and one of the 2 disk drives from my E8400-based mythtv box, which would be a comparble configuration to the 49 Watt@idle Atom setup, my system would draw only 50 watts idle. No real savings...

Marc

Correction, that's a 1GHz pentium-m inside the AppleTV.

The pentium-m is a bit faster than the atom 330, clock for clock. My tests with the dual-core atom 330 show the 1.6GHz atom 330 (using a single core) is slightly fast than the 1GHz pentium-m but not a straight clock difference in cpu power.

The real speed increase is dual-core vs single core. So think of the dual-core atom 330 as a little more than twice the ponies as the 1GHz pentium-m in the AppleTV.

What this means in real world performance is most all 720p mkv files (independent of what video encoding is inside the mkv) will play fine. All mpeg2 formats should also play fine. All 720p mpeg2/mpeg4/h264 should also play fine. 1080p mpeg4/h264 is going to be limited to low profile.

Another data point is the fan on the chipset is a piece of crap. If you get one of these, plan on replacing it. The actual atom cpu has a heat sink but no fan.

I can get some real world electrical power consumption tonight. This will be a good indication of cpu and chipset power consumption as this system is booted via a USB flash drive so no hard disk is preset.

If anyone has any video content they want me to test on this atom 330 ITX platform, PM me for a URL to a semi-private ftp server that I run for AppleTV testing.

davilla, thanks for taking the time to measure and report power consumption -- that will be great info to have! In terms of playback -- if you could test any 1080i mpeg2 recording using bob2x deinerlacer, it would be much appreciated.

Marc

So far I'm seeing 32-35 Watts but that's only boot into XBMC Live. I have some problem with playing video content I need to solve first :(

ok, more test results. Still XBMCLive based as I have to find a spare HD to install knoppmyth onto.

Max watts I've see is 41W. atom 330 cpu. This is USB flash based XBMCLive with second USB flash drive that's holding the test video content.

1080i mpeg2 -> 126 percent cpu.
720p h.264 in mkv containter, high-profile, high bit-rate -> 171 percent cpu.

With these results, I would say

any flavor mpeg2 -> no problem
any 720p (mpeg2/mpeg4/h.264) -> no problem