VIA EPIA Mini-ITX good enough for XBMC Live?

[realjobe]

Dear Board.
I just tested LIVE for the first time, and I was litterally speechless... amazing!!

The question is now to buildUp a ultimate platform for LIVE to work like a charm, and VIA's EPIA Mini-ITX models comes to mind. There are no nVidia or ATI chip, there's VIA's own Chrome9 (DirectX® 9.0 compatible and MPEG-2 Decoding Acceleration), so is this problem? There are Optical audio and DVI out (?). The point is to have fanles, HDDless and small FullHD (.mkv) capabilities MediaCenter and boots from HiSpeed USB stick.

? Is eg. MS Remote controll possible to use with LIVE? The MS's XBox IR-receiver needs to be 'taken care of = make it USB compatible' > small job.

[Gamester17]

XBMC Live does not support VIA/S3 graphics, nor do I believe that graphics hardware powerful enough.
http://xbmc.org/wiki/?title=XBMC_Live

...and XBMC does not yet support decoding acceleration on the GPU, (the GPU does the scaling when outputing video but all video decoding is done on the CPU, and no VIA CPU is capable of decoding 1080p FullHD on the CPU, in fact I doubt any of them will even decode 720p H.264 videos on the CPU).

There are plenty of Mini-ITX motherboard that support the much faster Intel Core 2 Duo processors, get one of those instead (preferably with integrated NVIDIA graphics, ...GeForce 6-series is good enough for 720p but if you want native 1080p playback then you should go for nForce/GeForce 7-series or better yet nForce/GeForce 8-series).

[realjobe]

There are plenty of Mini-ITX motherboard that support the much faster Intel Core 2 Duo processors, get one of those instead (preferably with integrated NVIDIA graphics, ...GeForce 6-series is good enough for 720p but if you want native 1080p playback then you should go for GeForce 6-series or better yet GeForce 8-series).

Thank you, pleasing answer.

[vectorite]

Just set up live yesterday, as stable as my old xbox,

E8400
Intel DP35DP
Nvidia 8500GT
6400 memory got 4gb, probably need 512MB

Live just works of usb

[realjobe]

The board is quite big http://www.intel.com/Products/Desktop/Motherboards/DP35DP/DP35DP-overview.htm and with Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 prosessor there must be fans to cool the system? Is this setup able to play 1920x1080 FullHD .mkv files from SMB share (Gbit ethernet)

?How long does it take to boot from USB?
?Audio with optical connector (5-7.1) works ok?
?Do you have any IR-remote units attached?
?There is ATX power connector, so it requires PC's transformer.

Sounds great though.

[Gamester17]

How long does it take to boot from USB?The time it takes to do a cold boot (from when the system is totally powered down) mostly depends on how long it takes for your motherboard to to complete the P.O.S.T. (Power On Self Test), on some motherboards the POST take 2 seconds (like on a IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad laptop) while on others it might take up to 30 seconds.

The good news is that XBMC Live supports Suspend, (look under XBMC settings in the GUI), and power-up from suspend takes about 3-seconds on most computers.

PS! Suspend (S3) mode on a computer is like a TV Stand-By mode, it that the system does not completely power-off but instead shutdown almost completely while still providing electricity to RAM (Random Access Memory) keeping everything saved, drawing perhaps around 1 WATT per hour while in this Suspend mode,, (most Apple Mac desktop computers use this as default making them really fast to 'boot').

[The-Boxhead]

remember that by tweaking bios settings you can trim down boot time alott !
Disable everything you dont need, and dont use auto detection of harddisks etc. Also enable fast boot et etc etc. On some boards you can trim down 10-15 seconds by optimizing bios settings :)=