New player-of-media
I picked up a new toy today: An Acer Aspire Rivo. It's a small, diamond-shaped thin that is basically a weak Atom-CPU stapled to a screaming-fast GF9400. This gives it some interesting properties, and foretells what is to come in the computing world.
There was a bit of confusion at Fry's where I bought it. The display model with the "$200" price tag wasn't what was on the shelf below it. For $130 more, I got a quad-core instead of a dual-core, and 2GB of RAM instead of 1GB -- an upgrade I'm happy to pay for, but now I need to figure out what to do with the extra cores.
I bought this in the hopes that it could replace the Xbox we've been using as our media center PC. While setup was very easy, the Xbox is really showing its age, as it has trouble decoding the more advanced H.264 videos. Also annoying is its lack of a "Power On" button on the remote.
All this is fixed with the Ion.
The first thing I did when I got it home was install a minimal Ubuntu install, and then I followed the steps to install XBMC on top of that. A few additional installs, like lirc and sabnzbd, and everything was done.
Without breaking a sweat, this thing can mount Windows shares from the network, then play full 1080p video at 40 Mbit/s (faster than our network can push, actually). It doesn't even sound like there are any fans running when it does this. "top" shows 25-35% cpu being used (with 400% available with quad cores), and I suspect most of that is decoding the audio.
As if that wasn't fancy enough, the Xbox remote works with a cable I hacked together. I just plug the Xbox IR receiver into the USB port, and the remote works. I've enabled USB Wake, so pressing any button on the remote causes the unit to power up. Joy!
Getting this set up has cost about as much as other options I've investigated, but has been easier to set up, requires less power, runs faster and cooler, can decode higher resolutions, and even comes with a snazzy wireless keyboard and mouse.
I'm waiting for a VGA -> Component converter box that I bought to arrive, at which point this will be hooked up to the TV directly, and the Xbox will be unceremoniously decommissioned.
There was a bit of confusion at Fry's where I bought it. The display model with the "$200" price tag wasn't what was on the shelf below it. For $130 more, I got a quad-core instead of a dual-core, and 2GB of RAM instead of 1GB -- an upgrade I'm happy to pay for, but now I need to figure out what to do with the extra cores.
I bought this in the hopes that it could replace the Xbox we've been using as our media center PC. While setup was very easy, the Xbox is really showing its age, as it has trouble decoding the more advanced H.264 videos. Also annoying is its lack of a "Power On" button on the remote.
All this is fixed with the Ion.
The first thing I did when I got it home was install a minimal Ubuntu install, and then I followed the steps to install XBMC on top of that. A few additional installs, like lirc and sabnzbd, and everything was done.
Without breaking a sweat, this thing can mount Windows shares from the network, then play full 1080p video at 40 Mbit/s (faster than our network can push, actually). It doesn't even sound like there are any fans running when it does this. "top" shows 25-35% cpu being used (with 400% available with quad cores), and I suspect most of that is decoding the audio.
As if that wasn't fancy enough, the Xbox remote works with a cable I hacked together. I just plug the Xbox IR receiver into the USB port, and the remote works. I've enabled USB Wake, so pressing any button on the remote causes the unit to power up. Joy!
Getting this set up has cost about as much as other options I've investigated, but has been easier to set up, requires less power, runs faster and cooler, can decode higher resolutions, and even comes with a snazzy wireless keyboard and mouse.
I'm waiting for a VGA -> Component converter box that I bought to arrive, at which point this will be hooked up to the TV directly, and the Xbox will be unceremoniously decommissioned.