pcHDTV :: View topic - Mini ITX Motherboard with HDTV MPEG-2 Decoder & HDTV Ou

kfowlsk · Guest

[Shameless plug]

LV-667T Advanced Digital Media Mini-ITX Mainboard (HDTV output)

check it out here: http://resonanceone.com/nucleus/Core.php

Scott Larson

Is there an XvMC driver for the MPEG acceleration on the S3 Unicore chip?

If not, that board's 1 Ghz processor is not going to give you decent HDTV output in Linux.

kfowlks · Guest

YES, There is a XvMC driver for the MPEG II decoder along with MPEG4 acceleration. Mplayer has also been patched to allow the hardware to do deinterlacing and other tricks. You can decode HDTV with this board using only about 30% CPU.

- Kevin

Scott Larson

There are many different versions of this board out there. One is a "DVI" version of the board which sounds great. Another is the "HDTV" version that you're selling which has component video. Is there any reason that the DVI version couldn't do HDTV?

Also some versions have SATA. Does yours? What BIOS does it come with?

This does look like a cute little board. Smile

kfowlks · Guest

Hello, Scott

Yes, there 3 versions of this board. I belive you might able to get HDTV out of the DVI version, but this is no viable for most HDTV TV sets. The HDTV (component video) version uses a different TV encoder then the rest so that it can output to a HDTV display. Yes, the boards has 2 x SATA conntions. It has the original BIOS from COMMELL BIOS. It also has 8 general purpose I/O so you can connect a LCD display or for status LED or whatever.

- Kevin

Scott Larson

I may have to buy one just because it's the only non-Nvidia board that has XvMC.

Scott Larson

One more question... does it have an SPDIF connector for AC-3 passthrough?

kfowlks · Guest

Hello, Scott

Yes, the board does support 5.1 audio output, it has a 5 pin header S/PDIF interface. But to support this youĺl need the cable & back plate.

Kevin

Scott Larson

I hacked together an SPDIF backplane using the RCA video out backplane (which I won't be using) and a soundcard cable.

Is the component video not supposed to display anything until you have all the proper Via drivers installed? The VGA works with the generic VESA driver of course but nothing has come out of the component video yet.

kfowlks · Guest

Make sure you setup the BIOS to output to the TV and the correct component out.

e.g. Y/Pr/Pb etc. you'll also need the latest unichrome drivers. I was able to view my X desktop on my HDTV without any drivers jsut using the VESA.

- Kevin

Guest

very interesting...

Scott Larson

I'm struggling with the unichrome drivers right now. The hardware is extremely picky about modelines. The display adapter has a limited number of valid dotclock settings so the modelines have to be exact, otherwise they're rejected.

At this point my VGA will only display 640x480, even with the VESA driver. I haven't even tried the component out yet.

I haven't been able to compile the driver from source due to missing include files. It looks like I need to install more X development RPM's even though I installed Fedora as a development system.

Scott Larson

When Kevin says the latest unichrome drivers, he doesn't mean the official ones in sourceforge.net. This board is pretty new and those drivers don't quite work with the "Unichrome Pro" CN400 chip. You'll need the drivers here.

Scott Larson

OK I've been totally unable to get the component video to put out anything other than 480i. I have HDTV 720P set in the BIOS and it still sends 480i to the component interface. I've been using the open source version of the Unichrome drivers because I loaded Fedora Core 3 and Via's official drivers haven't been updated since Core 2. It looks like the CN400 chip that supports HDTV on this board is new and the open source guys haven't gotten around to supporting it at higher resolutions yet (also they seem to have that common attitude that DVD is all anyone should ever want to display anyway).

My next project will be to wipe out the system, load Fedora Core 2, and use the official Via drivers and utilities. They clearly support HDTV.

Other than the component video problem, the VGA video seems to work pretty well. HD keeps the 1 Ghz CPU is plenty busy even with XvMC support but it's perfectly acceptable if you're not going to be using this board for anything else.

Scott Larson

OK, the real problem with this board is the various version of drivers that are out there. The Open Source Unichrome drivers seemed like the best bet but they don't appear to support HDTV. The official VIA drivers do but they don't run on Fedora 3 yet. They just recently released some driver source to them and I was able to port them to Fedora 3.

The main limitation is that the display resolution is not very adjustable. You can't just gtf a modeline and expect it to work. It has to match the limited dotclocks the board can produce otherwise they just get rejected. So far I've only been able to put out some 1280x720p which has a lot of overscan on my display. Since modelines have to match exactly what the drive wants, there's no way to adjust it.

I don't see any way to get the 1368x768 resolution I need but maybe the Unichrome guys will figure out the hardware now that VIA has released some source.

The driver doesn't appear to support independent (dual head) X displays although it does in Windows. I've only been able to "simulcast" over two displays.