That's odd, as he was quoting his reply to greysky, who asked about upgrading the video card...
Anyway, I don't see an AGP or PCI-X, so nix that idea. Maybe a 5200 card though, as they come in PCI as I recall.

Just be warned that a PCI 5200 card doesn't preform nearly as
well as an AGP one. It's OK for standard definition, but
neither myself nor anybody I've corresponded with was able to
get a PCI 5200 to handle HD playback.

_________________
Grant

That is correct. I am thinking of pulling this board and putting it in a very low profile case(think consumer DVD player- 1.5 inches tall), with a picoATX power supply. I would like to avoid having to use any cards in the system (the picture has the modem that came in the machine still in the slot). I will be able to pull all the cards and get away with a slimline case, because I am only using SD.

I wanted to "give back" to the community, and test as many scenarios that my time and the community can come up with, I do have a limited budget and a few available spare parts lying about, to help with this idea. To the point anybody have any ideas on testing the power draw on this thing?

You need to find/borrow a "kill-a-watt" meter.

I would like to see if you can get HD working.... Your first attempts are close enough that I might buy one of the boards.

Did you try viaXVMC ? as the decoder option on the first screen of the playback options?

Wondering if that will work for HD. The OSD will be a grayscalle if it is working.

A bit off topic, but since you brought it up, everyone should have one of these things. I got mine from newegg for $20 shipped. It rocks. Here is a screenshot of the idle power consumption of my backend back taken from my athcool thread.



Sorry the pics look like s*it... I had to hold the camera behind some furniture to shoot them.

_________________
Retired KM user (R4 - R6.04); friend to LH users.

Here is the motherboard that is used in the Everex $200 pc:

http://clubit.com/product_detail.cfm?itemno=A4842001

Some reviews of the board at the link say the following on power consumption:

4 watts idle, 7.5 watts load

http://clubit.com/product_detail.cfm?it ... 2001&tab=4

Sorry for the Delay -- life took over for a bit. I have tried the viaXVMC with and without bob2x (performs better without), but the OSD has never been grayscale. Any suggestions on some post I can look at? I have tried searching, but I can seem to find the single tree through the forest of results.

Thanks!

Did you try since you changed the driver from vesa to via?

If not give it another try.

I still have my driver set to via, and the OSD theme is at the default of blootube-osd.

Just wanted to say thanks for the test drive on this unit. It makes a good Tier 1 SD FE, would no doubt do well as a MBE and a report I've read says that it does nicely running FreeNAS if you want to go that route. Overall, a real flexible piece of hardware OOTB.

You might want to check out this post:

http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=17460

Two PCI slots and apparently a SATA connector... I could imagine setting one up as a back end. Add a pair of tuners and a big hard disk.

I think the 10/100 ethernet would be a limiting factor there. But then again gigabit hasn't really become universal yet.

I discovered that with non-SATA drives, even on my dual 2GHz AMD, HDTV playback often stutters. I'd like to see someone set up one of these as a combined backend/frontend. Try transcoding some HDTV (just to shrink; keep the same resolution) and let us know how playback handles with the reduced disk usage.

I'm also curious about the speed of transcoding on that hardware...

Hi,
Just to give a little insight to the Everex GOS box that I have noticed. I did a manual install after resizing the drive. I will probably once in while actually boot in to the GOS but it is handy for trouble shooting and undoing changes that I may do that breaks something

Anyway long story short, R5F27 runs fine, had some issues with the xserver as the via chip didn't like some of the stuff KM wants to use. Copy the xorg.conf from the GOS to KM and now the via server works however.. you loose a few features. OSD was one feature that wasn't available. Patch in a few lines from the KM xorg and that is fixed too.

At this point, I can use the box for second stream digital. The 1.5 giggle hurtz just isn't enough power although the hidef did come up and try to play. I was using the HDHomeRun as a tuner so the networking may have used some cpu resources also.

Played back of a couple of my sample videos which were good. One sampIe I tried was a 1080i recording of the NBC Today Show that I had turned into a dvd iso. It looked good, played smooth. I believe the dvd process squeezes it to be a standard wide screen dvd.

Since I don't have a tuner card in it I can only surmise that analog tv would be fine with an x50 card.

I didn't try recording as the box will not be doing digital anyway but the xorg bugged me and once I made it work, I got curious.

The box is very light weight, only a few pounds at the most, it runs quiet and cool. The front panel usb jacks are inverted from what I consider normal as the dust can get on the contacts. Sorry, that is about the best complaint I have of the machine. One can not expect a VW to ride like a Caddy, just that it gets you there.

Mike

Both Jaton and EVGA have a low profile PCI video card with geforce 6200.

One of my box is an old optiplex gx110 with an added jaton 6200 (pci338). I can *almost* play hdtv from a 20mb transport stream (save from a hdhomerun). It skips frames here and there. This is a P3 933MHz. There's an adaptor to put in a P4 1.4 (socket 370) and I'm pretty sure this would pull it.

The C7 1.5 should be able with a 6200.