[Sussex] laptop as a media center

[Steve Dobson]

Paul

On Tue, Jan 23, 2007 at 07:13:55AM +0000, Paul Howard wrote:
> thanks for the lengthy and detailed reply.  I certainly now have a much
> clearer idea of what is involved. The biggest problem I think I have is that
> my laptop has the ATI mobility radeon 9000 vga card in it rather than the
> nvida one.

Take a look at the Gentoo Wiki on configuring ATI for s-video.  It reports
that there is a open source driver for Radeon 8500 and newer so it might
work for the 9000.
 
> I haven't had much luck getting the proprietary drivers to work well with
> this card at all.

It can be the case that the proprietary drivers are not as complete as they
should be.  Company's sometime take a look at the money and say adding
feature X just isn't worth it.  Or the driver writers working for the
company just aren't as good as they should be.

If you really want a nice little media centre then I would suggest you
look at getting a PCI card and installing it in either a fanless system
(like VIA) or a quite desktop.

I rescued an old Compact that was heading for the skip.  Added the
Hauppauge PVR-350 and most disk space and it is now doing a wonderful
job as a PVR.  Not sure if the PVR-350 is still made, I think the PVR-500
replaces it.

The advantages of a card that does both encoding and decoding in hardware
is you can run them in systems that don't have much CPU power.  When I
had the card installed in a fanless VIA system with a 500MHz CPU with
the card recording and playing back at the same time I was using less
than 10% of the CPU power available.  When doing nothing I think it
used around 5%.

Steve
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