Rich Freeman posted on Sat, 14 Mar 2015 08:10:07 -0400 as excerpted: > On Sat, Mar 14, 2015 at 7:43 AM, Duncan <1i5t5.dun...@cox.net> wrote: >> >> The quad-core, 2+ GHz CPU @ 25W power dissipation should be plenty of >> power, even for playing media (one review said 80% usage of all four >> cores for 1080p, however, which it'll handle, but realistically not 4k, >> when I eventually even have a display that'll do 4k), and it should de- >> clock and power-down for routing-only. And that dissipation, quite >> fans shouldn't be a big issue. >> >> > If you want to play HD video on an mini-ITX MB you're better off using > one designed for this. I have an aging NVidia ION board that plays > 1080p without a hitch as my mythtv frontend. However, you are limited > to codecs that are supported by hardware decoding - I doubt I'd get full > HD on software decoding. > > This is a router, right? > > When you want a cheap tiny board that consumes 10s of watts with an > external power supply and doesn't need a fan, you are going to have to > decide in advance what your priorities are. It isn't like a $250 > CPU+MB+RAM system with a 500W power supply that is a general purpose > computing device.
You are certainly correct for full-hd. But one of the big threads I read about the am1 chipset and cpus was on a media-player-machine forum. It seems unaccelerated full-hd is just beyond what it can do, such that it's viewable, but with obvious dropped- frames, etc. But accelerated using the built-in Radeon hd8xxx (whatever it was) graphics... it can actually do quite well. I was actually rather pleasantly surprised, as I hadn't even considered that use-case. =:^) They did mention that full-hd youtube with the html5 player did have substantial dropouts, etc. Switching it back to flash, which made better use of acceleration, apparently, was far better. But of course I don't do flash as it's proprietary, tho I've definitely been enjoying the new default-html5 youtube in firefox on my main machine recently. =:^) Anyway, now that the possibility has been opened to me, what I actually had in mind was for the demanding stuff when I'm actually watching it, continue to play that on the main machine. But, for when I pull up those "12 hours of rain" things on minitube that are often (but not always) lower resolution or possibly periodically changing freeze-framed anyway, there's a very good chance I'll be able to play /those/ directly on the router, at least, shutting off the main machine for them. And by the same token, I could put mpd on the router and control it via mpd-client of choice run either on the router directly or the main machine. That's pure audio, no video, so it should play just fine on the router. =:^) Meanwhile, if it turns out none of that works after all, and certainly if I do the aggressive routing/firewalling/shaping management I want to be /able/ to[1], I don't expect to be playing anything on it at the same time as well. But I don't expect to be doing that intense level of routing/shaping/firewalling /all/ the time, or even in the "immediate" future, so... --- [1] Cox, my local cableco, is advertising "gigablast" speeds in the area, symmetric 1 gigabit both up and down, for those willing to pay the upwards of $100/mo they're asking and lucky enough to be in the early rollout area. I may or may not be, but even the 150 mbit speeds available in most of the rest of the valley needs a gigabit-ethernet wan port, which my legacy setup doesn't have, and I want to at least be ready whether I get it or not, thus this whole project... which after all I've not actually spent anything but time on yet, tho it's looking very likely I will within days or weeks, now. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
