Via M series

Hardware

These are fairly nice motherboards for a small system (especially the 1GHz+ versions using the C7 CPU). There are multiple variations including some special use ones. Nearly all have S3 or CastleRock? graphics, Via chipset and a mix of various IO features.

For example this is the lspci of an MS1000 which I use for a PBX, QoS Firewall and VPN gateway.

aivanov@maui-covenant:~$ lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8623 [Apollo CLE266]
00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8633 [Apollo Pro266 AGP]
00:0f.0 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C586A/B/VT82C686/A/B/VT823x/A/C PIPC Bus Master IDE (rev 06)
00:10.0 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 81)
00:10.1 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 81)
00:10.2 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 81)
00:10.3 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 81)
00:10.4 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB 2.0 (rev 86)
00:11.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237 ISA bridge [KT600/K8T800/K8T890 South]
00:11.5 Multimedia audio controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8233/A/8235/8237 AC97 Audio Controller (rev 60)
00:12.0 Ethernet controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6102 [Rhine-II] (rev 78)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8623 [Apollo CLE266] integrated CastleRock graphics (rev 03)

It also has a working set of temperature and voltage sensors. However, not all sensors are connected on all motherboards. If one is returning constant values all the time it can be disabled.

Usage as a media PC

The 1GHz M(S) was just about fast enough to be able to run vlc in 1366x768 and upscale DVD to that resolution with Debian 4.0. The M6000 is too slow for that.

However, there is an alternative option which works flawlessly for any Apollo/CastleRock CLE266. These support full motion compensation and decoding for MPEG using a non-standard XvMC? acceleration specific to them.

MPEG decode using VLD on Via M series

Via can decode and display SD (up to 1024x1024) content with flying colours if the via specific XvMC? extension is used. Unfortunately this extension is still not in VLC or Mplayer main tree. The Mplayer patches from openchrome.org apply cleanly to Debian stable. However, that gets you nowhere because Debian builds vs shared ffmpeg and does not pick up the patched sources. I have tried to get the patches into the shared ffmpeg libs. The tree patches cleanly, but something somewhere is still missing so VLD does not activate. As a result the "Debian way" (TM) will have to be abandoned and Mplayer built with ffmpeg embedded.

To build VLD-enabled Mplayer the following steps need to be followed:

• apt-get source mplayer
• remove the shared ffmpeg patch from debian/patches
• remove all references to ffmpeg libs from debian/control
• remove all ffmpeg -dev libs off the systemn
• apply openchrome vld patches
• edit debian/rules to add --disable-libavutil_so --disable-libavcodec_so --disable-libavformat_so --disable-libpostproc_so --disable-x264 to DEB_BUILD_CONFIGURE. x264 is not supported by VLD and the CPU does not have the grunt to decode in software anyway. At the same time trying to install it will drag in all ffmpeg libs so it is best to do without.

It is now possible to build a mplayer package which will support VLD. I will attach mine to this page shortly, but I would recommend you to "build your own".

With VLD even Via M6000 using a miserly Eden C3 600MHz CPU can play DVD res MPEG2 with flying colours.