<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 9/18/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Brian Wood</b> <<a href="mailto:beww@beww.org">beww@beww.org</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
James Orr wrote:<br>> I'm thinking about separating my backend from my frontend. They are<br>> currently combined, but it gets a little noisy sometimes.<br>><br>> I found this as a possible frontend ... <a href="http://www.koolu.com/">
http://www.koolu.com/</a><br>> <<a href="http://www.koolu.com/">http://www.koolu.com/</a>><br>><br>> I searched the list and was quite surprised not to get any hits as it<br>> even has a mythtv frontend running in the product demo video.
<br>><br>> Obviously this box won't have the horse-power for playing back HD, but<br>> that is not a concern for me at the moment, or indeed for the forseeable<br>> future.<br>><br>> Is anybody using one of these? The one downside I see is that I use
<br>> MythDVD as my main DVD player, and this obviously does not have a DVD<br>> player in it. I could use an external USB DVD player, does anybody know<br>> how well those work under Linux?<br><br>Hmmm... A 500Mhz. CPU is right on the edge of being able to decode
<br>DVD-quality MPEG2 without any hardware assistance, and that assumes<br>highly-optimized software.<br><br>Obviously you couldn't use a PCI capture device, but USB or even a HDHR<br>might be a possibility.<br><br>I'm not familiar with the LX800 graphics, but I'd guess it doesn't offer
<br>any help with MPEG playback.<br><br>It might work, for SD, then again it might not.<br><br>No way to tell except for some brave (or well-financed) soul to try it out.</blockquote><div><br>The plan is to move my current frontend/backend to the basement along with the two cable boxes and then run it as a backend only, so I won't need any form of capture device on the new frontend.
<br><br>My first mythtv box was a celeron 466, and that was capable of playback and recording at the same time with no problem, but DVD playback stuttered a little.<br><br>However, I just noticed there is no composite or s-video out on the koolu, only VGA, and convertors are expensive enough that it seems more cost effective to look for other solutions.
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