[Openchrome-users] S3 Chrome S27 PCIe?

[Stroller]

Hi there,

About a year ago there was a thread <http://tinyurl.com/2u35q6> on  
the S3 Chrome S27 PCIe cards which concluded:

   ... they are not available in Europa yet :-)
    Give it a shot if you have the opportunity and report back, the
   hardware is hopefully not that different and can probably be  
supported
   with some amount of work.

I see that they are now available in Europe:
   http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=37073
I read it in The Sun, so it must be true.

Reviews of these cards are mixed, but this one is fairly positive:
   http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/s3-chrome-s27_26.html

So has anyone tried one of these yet?

I'm about to build a PC for MythTV use, and whilst I don't mind  
paying the price of a good Core2Duo processor I understand that, with  
all the other possible demands upon a system, even these can struggle  
with HD playback if hardware acceleration is not enabled. The common  
MythTV solution is to use a nVidia card & their binary drivers with  
XvMC enabled, but I prefer not to use binary drivers if possible.

I like the look of the Intel X3000 graphics hardware ("Graphics Media  
Accelerator"), as it's fairly apparent that Intel themselves provide  
good Linux support for this chipset, but these are only available as  
on-board graphics, and I'm not immediately able to find a m/board  
that otherwise meets all my preferences (full-sized ATX with multiple  
PCI slots, 6 x SATA, DVI out for the aforementioned X3000) so the the  
S27 PCIe looks promising. This would perhaps allow me to purchase a  
more ideal motherboard & choose a graphics card with OSS drivers.

Does anyone have any comments on this, please?

The appropriate section of the MythTV wiki <http://www.mythtv.org/ 
wiki/index.php/XvMC#Unichrome> indicates that the OpenChrome driver  
supports XvMC but I don't really have any idea of how good this is,  
compared to the nVidia binary drivers or Intel's offerings. (??)

Am I correct in understanding that Via have made reasonable  
documentation available for the OpenChrome developers to work from?
As I understand it they originally made their own drivers available  
as OSS?

Finally, is it likely the S27 PCIe can display at 1920 x 1080 @  
50/60hz via DVI?

It would be great if this card will work for me and if there's room  
for improvement then I'd happily consider sponsoring a card or two  
for OpenChrome &/or MythTV developers. But if any of my expectations  
are unreasonable then I'd be grateful to hear, so I can look at other  
solutions.

Stroller.