Sage client unworkable on mini-itx?

[Jimmydigital]

I've seen mention of people using mini-itx boards... but I'm not having much luck trying to get just the sage-client to run on a Nehemiah M10000 board. It's 1Ghz with 512 ram.. using on board video and spdif out. My server/encoder machine is very fast.. with lots of memory and running a 350 card. When I try to watch a live stream on the client.. it will peg the CPU and the interface laggs behind so badly it's not usable. The system is running winxp and otherwise shows no problems. Any ideas?

Thanks,
J

[stanger89]

On an EPIA, you absolutely have to use the hardware accelleration provided by the chipset, that CPU does not have the power to decode MPEG on it's own. I can't be much more help than to suggest you make sure DXVA/Hardware Accelleration is enabled in your decoders.

[bhyman1]

The way I got my Epia working great was to use PowerDVD as the codec with hardware acceleration enabled. I had to get the latest drivers from Via Arena for it to work.

PowerDVD supports the Mpeg2 accelerator natively. I don't think any other codecs do right out of the box.

[Menehune]

I have my EPIA barely working using overlay and the TV out enabled. The CPU usage is at 100% while playing back and the menus usually take 2-10 seconds to appear. I need to get the PowerDVD codec installed so I can use the hardware accelleration.

[dbfresh23]

If your pci slot isn't being used, you may want to consider an Xcard, should drastically reduce the cpu usage and shouldn't really add too much power consumption in case you're using a lower wattage dc power brick.

[nielm]

...and also don't even try to use VMR9 renderer: The EPIA M-series just cannot do it! (I ran My M10000 as a sage server/client/STB for 18 months before upgrading because I needed more disks, more tuners and wanted to do High Quality DivX playback)

[jchiso]

I have a system built on an EPIA 800 board that works perfectly as both a Sage System and Client. I am using a PCI-based Radeon 9200SE for video with hardware-accelerated PowerDVD decoders.

[falchulk]

Turn off 3d acceleration and overlay color kying in detailed setup\adanced in Sage. That will ix the slow menu. Power DVd as stated before is the best to use. Make sure yo turn on HW acceleration in power dvd's setup so its enabled when you use sage. At least thats what I had to do when I used my mini itx.

[heffe2001]

I used one of their M10000 boards for a long time in my client (until some of the more advanced STV's slowed it down too much, and I started converting some of my stuff to divx/xvid). The menus were slightly sluggish, but it was a workable system. I used WinDVD for my decoders btw. Just make sure you have all the latest VIA drivers & stuff loaded on the box.