Hi.
Ive just bought myself an EPIA N1000 mobo and watching TV/mpeg content is very choppy, so I suspect the drivers are not correcly setup.
Is it the knoppwiki page "EpiaMotherboards" you are referring to?
Does this apply to the new nano-boards?
http://wiki.knoppmyth.net/index.php?pag ... therboards

rgds Martin

Hi

As my first real dabble with Linux I'm putting together a mythtv box but after reading a few threads think I may have made a mistake in picking my hardware and am now looking for some advice.

I picked up a Via Epia-5000A (fanless Nehemiah 533MHz with Apollo PLE133 chipset). I've been trying for a couple of months now to get it working, I've tried several different linux flavours including mythdora but so far knoppmyth has performed the best.

The installation was perfect but I had to use the 'vesa' driver to get X to display.

Still the video playback is choppy and dvd playback even worse, at first I thought it was just a driver issue but now I suspect the hardware is not up to the job. Does anyone have any experience with this board? Any ideas?

Like I said I'm new to Linux and to make matters worse I don't have a monitor so am having to do it all through the tv-out side of things. Anyone see any major problems with that?

I'm now considering either sticking in a half-decent video card or swapping the mobo for a better one - anyone have any advice.

I have one of those too, great little boards, but unfortunately not for video. It doesn't have the mpeg2 decoder. My EPIA is happy running the family NAS.

Nope.

You could maybe go for a PVR350 to help with the TV, but they're on the way out. You'll then still have problems with slow menu's and other issues due to the limitations of the CPU.

If you want there is a group specifically focused at the EPIA family.

Called mini-myth can be found at linpvr.org.

I use it for my diskless frontend and knoppmyth for my backend and other frontend.

One option is a PVR-350. With hardware MPEG2 encoding and
decoding even a 500MHz VIA won't break a sweat. I ran a PVR-350
with a 1GHz '350, and it never hit more than about 10% CPU
usage except when commercial flagging or when playing music
with one of the visualizations running. [Don't do that, by the
way. The music visulaizations bog things down so badly that any
recording that's in progress will be choppy.]

DVD playback might not be perfect, though -- that's not handled
by the '350 HW decoder.

_________________
Grant