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I purchased a dual core atom mini ITX system a few months ago in the hope of running it as a MythTV frontend. This doesn’t sound very challenging, after all just about any machine can run TV now days. The challenge for me is that I love HD movies. So this begged the question, could a $90 computer consuming roughly 30watts play an HD movie that normally takes a 150+ watt computer running at high clock speeds with a high end graphics card? Well, last night I got my answer. After installing a fresh copy of Mythbuntu 8.10 on my Atom box I started working on the Core AVC for Linux installation. Core AVC is an amazing application developed originally for Windows. It allows you to multithread H264 decoding. Most HD movies and TV shows people get today over the Internet use this codec. It is amazing the quality that can be retained while keeping file sizes down. The down side to all of these purks is that to decode these films you need a lot of processing power. Traditionally a single core very high clock speed CPU would do. The problem is that recently multi-core CPUs are all the rage, and they have lower clock speeds than say the old P4 processors. On current Core2Duo’s or Core2Quads this is no longer an issue, but on lightweight hardware or older hardware it is a major problem. That is until the Core AVC codec was released. It allows you to harness the power of both of your smaller cores to tag team on the task of decoding the video. This allows you to use a very cheap, energy efficient, and low clock speed processor to decode high quality video normally reserved for high end PCs. So, people could watch these high def movies on Windows, but the Linux community was lagging behind in this area. There has been much work completed recently especially on the ffmpeg codecs to try and mimic the same performance gains as the Core AVC codecs, but in my opinion they just aren’t all the way there yet. So, a project was started to allow you to use the Windows based Core AVC codecs under Linux. The key here is the Wine project which allows Windows based applications to be run under Linux. After I completed the install everything is working better than I expected. Movies in 1080p that my 2.2GHz AMD Athlon 64 struggled with are cake for my 1.6GHz dual core Atom to cut through. Albeit there are some limitations still as too how high a quality stream it can handle, but for the most part it is astounding what it can do. I’m hopeful that the Linux community will continue to push forward with it’s efforts to build native forms of these codecs, but until then the Core AVC for Linux project is here to the rescue.