NES Retro Media Center

I now have spoken to VIA Embedded on Facebook, asking about new drivers that support HD playback on the P820 board and the answed I got was:

VIA Embedded yes, we do but we don’t provide chipset driver directly to end users. If you are our customer, please contact with our sales representatives.

You many go to this web site, http://linux.via.com.tw/support/downloadFiles.action
We don’t wanna release it since there are so many Linux version and it’s not quite easy for us to maintain.

The last couple of weaks I have been testing my VIA Epia P820 and the result so far is not good. My first thought was to run FreeBSD and using the OpenChrome driver but Via do not provide enough information about there boards so the OpenChrome team have not been able to make the driver fully support the VX855 chip. Because the OpenChrome driver did not work I tried the source driver VIA provided witch was using an old library from the X.org project called xf86Resources.h and from what I can see no BSD or Linux distribution is using that lib. Since all distributions did not have that library and did not support it the driver did not even compiled. Then i tried different Linux distributions with the same result. I even compiled X.org from source. And I have found out that almost every one who tries to use Linux with the EPIA-P820 & Amos 3001 fails.

Since VIA also has drivers for Windows I had to try, they work quite good you can watch movies in 480p (in the specifications 1080p should work but they do not). One of the downsides was that Windows took 5min and 4sec to boot, not so good for a media center. There is also a binary driver for Ubuntu 9.04 (current version of Ubuntu is 10.04) that I tried. After a day of work I got it to work and now I can watch DiVX movies with the CPU on 100% (do not forget that the board should support 1080p).

So how can VIA say that the EPIA-P820 & Amos 3001 with the VX855 can play HD movies up to 1080p if the do not have drivers for it? Phoronix.com and X.org calls the open source support that VIA has for a bluff, read the article here and the discussion here.

Today I got my VIA Epia P820 from Mini-ITX.de. Right now I have all the parts that I need som hopefully there will be alot of posts from now on. Lets start with the unboxing of the P820 moderboard!

I know I have said it before but now I will now wait any longer. The brand new VIA EPIA-P820 with the new 64-Bit Nano processor, have a look at there homepage! Since the board is so new it is hard to find resellers that ship to Sweden but the VIA’s Facebook group have helped me a lot.

So far I think these shops will ship to Sweden:

• http://via-itx.com/via-amos-3000-series.html
• www.mini-tft.de

A new form factor has been released today, the board measures 6×6 cm. Read more in there press release.

Finally! This is what I have been looking for: “The fanless VIA EPIA-P720 Pico-ITX provides superb hardware acceleration for HD media over native HDMI at resolutions of up to 1080p”. Now I just need to find a reseller or should I wait to the new VIA Nano 3000 64-bit CPU? :)

Sorry for not beeing so active here. I have been working on my OpenBSD router/firewall built on an Alix 2d3 board with flashdist. For the media center The future is looking very good! Just look at Fit PC2 and P710-HD!

The VIA Surfboard C855 meets this demand by providing flawless playback of high bit-rate 1080p HD video, which along with support for internal display resolutions of up to 1366 x 768 pixels and external display resolutions up to 1920 x 1440 pixels, the latest high definition VIA Vinyl Audio, and a wide range of connectivity options, allows for a rich on-the-go multimedia experience.

The future is looking bright! VIA is now presenting a new platform called Trinity and Nvidia have taken up the competition. Enjoy!