[vdr] HD-TV hardware decoding on motherboard instead of waiting for FF DVB-S2 card

[Ondrej Wisniewski]

With VDR getting ready for HD-TV it seems that today the MPEG4 decoding 
can only be done on a high end processor or an external decoder card. 
Many people are still waiting for a FF DVB-S2 card but it doesn't look 
very promising at the moment.

So I was wondering if it would be possible to use the on board video 
decoder chips of the VIA EPIA boards like the VIA EPIA EX15000G
http://www.via.com.tw/en/products/mainboards/motherboards.jsp?motherboard_id=450

This board mounts a CX700M2 chipset which features MPEG2/4 hardware 
decoding. It has DVI and Y/Pb/Pr video output as well as analog and 
SPDIF audio (coaxial and optical). So that's everything we need, isn't it.

I know, currently the OpenChrome video driver doesn't support MPEG2/4 
video decoding for the CX700M2 and there are probably other things 
missing from the software support side. But from what I see, this or a 
similar motherboard in combination with a budget DVB-S2 card have all 
the hardware features that are needed to have HD-TV. So we actually have 
the proper hardware platform *today* for a quite a low budget. So if all 
the efforts go into driver and application development for such a 
platform, there is no need to wait for FF DVB-S2 cards.

Or am I missing something here?

-- 
Ondrej