[mythtvnz] ION based frontend platforms available.

[Nick Rout]

On Fri, Sep 12, 2014 at 8:07 PM, Worik Stanton <worik.stanton at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/09/14 19:20, Nick Rout wrote:
>> What generation of ION? An lspci would tell me what I want to know :-)
>>
>
>
> Given criggie sent the PCI list (On 12/09/14 19:36),,,
>
> Is the GT218 OK?
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_PureVideo#Feature_Set_C says it is
> type C and the feature set is:
>
>

Let me translate

>     Supports complete acceleration

Acceleration = good

> for MPEG-1,

you won't see this these days


>MPEG-2,

DVD video, Freeview/Sky satellite transmissions


> MPEG-4 Part 2
> (a.k.a. MPEG-4 ASP),

ie Divx/Xvid and cousins


> VC-1/

Found on 18% of blurays according to http://www.blu-raystats.com/

> WMV9

Personally never struck it

> and H.264.

What is on basically all blurays other than the VC1 ones. Also
(importantly for this discussion) on Freeview Terrestrial. Most rips
you download from the internet (did I say that?) will be h264.

In short this chipset will decode anything you throw at it up to
1080p. It will also do pretty good  deinterlacing. If you want to
future proof for 4K of HEVC it is not for you. However if you want
something that will look good on your HDTV now and with today's tech,
they are great. I have two REVO R3700s which have the same chipset and
it looks great on my 65 inch TV.

Also the ION2 chipset SHOULD passthrough HD audio (DTS-HDMA and Dolby
TrueHD) if that is your thing. I don't have an amplifier to test that
on, and manufacturers CAN screw this up by bad bios/firmware
implementations. As I have at lest one machine that is known to do HD
audio, and I am unlikely to have more than one HS Audio setup, I am
comfortable buying a couple of these.

ION generation 1 is not so good. It has some noticeable omissions in
frame size in it's decoding abilities, and is often paired with an
inferior single core atom chip.

ION2 is what I want, which is why I asked. It is still Atom, but I
want video playback, not CPU.