Andrea Venturi wrote:
Does anyone know if there are or will be any "normal" ATX mainboards available with this chipset? I mean this mini-ITX stuff might be compact and noiseless, but they've always been limited to 1 or 2 PCI slots with riser card, what if one would use let's say 4 budget(-ci maybe too) cards or more for independent recordings and benefit from the hardware of the CN400 for video decoding MPEG2/4?Dr. Werner Fink wrote:Hmmm ... IMHO a FF card also has the advantage of an idle CPU most time which avoids required and therefore noisy fan(s). Only a good and passive cooled VGA-Card, with a Mpeg2/Mpeg4 HW decoder together with TV-out (RGB/S-Video on scart) or for the future a DVI-out to support modern TV sets, would be an argument. This because the only good fan is _no_ fan ;^)
that's deeply true!
but the main problem, for us, is that a FF is no good WRT an HDTV feed and MPEG4 (when it will come!)!
so we'd like to investigate which VGA cards are available WRT HDTV MPEG2 (and MPEG4) on the market with a good linux support (or a foreseeable one1)
my best option (WRT low power usage and compactness) is the "unichrome pro" core inside the via north bridge like the CN400:
http://www.via.com.tw/en/products/chipsets/c-series/cn400/