semi-green computing

[Colin McGregor]

On 2/17/09, Matt Price <matt.price-H217xnMUJC0sA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> hey all,
>
> i'm re-rebuilding our long-out-of-commission media center here at home,
> and thinking about what components to use.  As my kids get older and
> start to need a computer, I'd really like to limit the number of boxes
> we have draining power, so i'm kind of thinking i'd like to have just
> one box that records, downloads and plays video, stores music, and ALSO
> has a second seat/x-session on which my kids can surf the internet, type
> up homework, and also play educational games (for the last one i'm
> likely to need a windows virtual machine).

A topic that has been drawing a LOT of attention on the MythTV-users
mailing list is the topic of VDPAU (Video Decode and Presentation API
for Unix) a feature found in some NVidia GeForce 8 series and later
video cards. A VDPAU supporting card will let you off load a lot of
the video decoding work normally done by the CPU to the video card.
Cards that support this can be found for under $60 (Canadian). These
cards will let you use a fairly modest (read low power consumption)
CPU chip. How modest you could go is a subject of debate, but let's
just say that you will not need the latest fire breathing AMD/Intel
CPU to support video tasks.

The gotchas include, only the testing version 0.22 of MythTV supports
VDPAU (the current stable version of MythTV 0.21 doesn't support
VDPAU). You have to tread cafefully regarding VDPAU support, there
seems to be no rhyme or reason as to what cards in the GeForce 8
series support what...

> Because it's doing double duty, i'd like this machine to have a fairly
> powerful cpu; but because it'll be on a lot of the time, i'd like it to
> have a half-decent power profile -- especially, i guess, really good
> sleep states for all the processors, and a bios that supports timed
> wake-up, so i can setup mythtv to shutdown if it doesn't have any
> recording to do.  it's been a while since i bought any new hardware, and
> i just wondered if anyone out there had any recent experience looking
> for similar attributes.  also if you have any experience running
> multiple x-sessions -- e.g. can i run one session on the video out of my
> nvidia card, and a second one on the vga?  i'd love to hear about some
> helpful stories.  Thanks as always!
>
> matt
>
>
> --
> Matt Price
> matt.price-H217xnMUJC0sA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org
> --
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