[Gllug] Video drivers for EPIA CN Mini-ITX motherboard

[john at sinodun.org.uk]

I've long had an ambition to build a silent MythTV playback box.  Sorry -
"quiet" doesn't meet the requirements; it's got to be silent.

To this end I bought a 600MHz Mini-ITX board a few years ago, billed as
being suitable because of its hardware MPEG acceleration.  It's almost
good enough but not quite - it can't keep up with displaying DVB-T streams
with a high data rate (e.g. BBC1).  It can do the lower quality ones (like
ITV3) but stutters just slightly on the ones which use a higher picture
quality.

Now there are faster fanless boards around so I've bought an EPIC CN 1GHz
board.  This boasts Linux video drivers but...

The drivers released by VIA have to be seen to be believed.  The build
instructions are enough to induce vomiting.  The build script makes lots
of unwarranted assumptions about the state of your system, does nasty
things to your kernel source tree, creates unwanted directories directly
under / and falls over in a mess at the slightest provocation.  To say
that it is fragile is being excessively complimentary.

A web search throws up OpenChrome and UniChrome as possible alternatives. 
Before I invest any more time in these, does anyone have any experience of
doing this?  Has anyone already sorted out the build process for the VIA
drivers, or would anyone recommend OpenChrome over UniChrome or vice
versa?

TIA,
John

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