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Gordon Henderson wrote:
I'm assuming it's got some dedicated decoding chipset, a bit like what my BT Vision box has got, just does one thing. I gather the VIA boards would do the job if they had a dedicated video card such as an NVidia GeForce card, but then I guess that would put the power usage up.On Thu, 5 Nov 2009, Rob Beard wrote:Gordon Henderson wrote:LOL. Yeah I was poking around a bit with the firmware, it looks like it can do a fair few things if it has the right hardware. I'm thinking for playing HD media without having to stick on either the PC, or the PC and the stupidly noisy XBOX360 then it has to be worth 60 quid.Nice little box...A tuned Linux kernel, statically built runs in about 1.5MB these days, what bulks it up is "userland". So if you don't need a shell, X window system, web browser, etc. then it's perfectly easy to do... Obvously this thing does have some sort of GUI, but direct framebuffer handling isn't that bad.In some ways I feel it's a shame it's so cheap - it must be almost slave labour to produce something with that much in it for so little. It really can not be economically viable at that price. Better learn Chinese soon...GordonI dare say I could probably stick all the media I want on a USB hard drive and then just run it off this little box. According to the instructions it uses about 18 watts when in use and under 4 watts when in standby mode. God knows what the PC and/or XBOX use, I dare say it'll probably be more like 10 times that.With the right hardware you can keep the power down - e.g. the 1GHz VIA boards I use run at 15 watts and the Geodes run at 4 watts - however the Geodes don't have any graphics! The VIAs are supposed to have some form of hardware mp2 decode although I've never tried to use it - doubt it's much use for 1080p HD though! The MIPS processor might be better suited to shovelling data streams about though, but I really don't know much about their architecture - the most efficient way is going to be dedicated hardware, designed to do exactly the task to hand and nothing more - maybe this box has something like that inside it for the granhics driver?
PCs and even XBoxes are just too generic and not best suited for a "media" device - unless you're going to buid a dedicated PC - but even then, at 60 quid you're really really not going to beat this system...My original XBOX was great for playing standard definition video, but I find although the XBOX 360 is more than powerful enough to play HD video, it really is noisy.
My eventual plan is to build a MythTV PC so I can reduce the amount of set top boxes under the telly although when I get close to building a PC I find I have to spend the money on something a bit more important, so yeah I'm thinking that at 60 quid this box will probably do the job. :-)
Rob -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html