[gentoo-amd64] Re: Machine recommendations?

[Duncan]

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.duncan@×××.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