Shame about the price...
... but I have to say it looks like a really decent idea. I'm quite taken with the keypad/ remote thingy.
It kind of reminds me of a squashed PS2 for some reason.
But for 600 quid, I think I'll pass.
It’s been a long time since PC makers started trying to get PCs into people’s living rooms. Originally it was all about games, but consoles soon became a cheaper and better-supported option. Now, it’s about TV and disc playing, in particular 3D, HD viewing and Blu-ray too. Acer seems keen to revive the lounge PC and with the …
Windows Tax takes its toll...
how about a winfree *nix version?
anyway I have a cheap settop pvr box from Tesco with twin HD tuners that's got wifi and IPTV and iPlayer, and connects to my Media Center NAS, (where I 'might' have ripped some BR discs).. all for £200. so remind me what was the point again?
Or:
£300 for a Pentium Dual Core or Athlon X2 laptop, with easily enough power to decode 1080p MKV without dropping a frame
£80 for a 2TB harddrive
£0 for XBMC . Google if you're unaware of it.
£100 for an Orange Sanfrancisco. It's a phone that does a billion things, but the one we're interested in is the XBMC remote control app, which you really should search Youtube for footage on, since it's awesome
£480 for something considerably more flexible, capacious and, frankly, flash. At £600, this is really far too expensive considering how little you get.
Get yourself an old Acer Revo and a USB BluRay drive and you're there for less than $400.
I've got a setup very much like this for running AnyDVD (as I am a Linux user).
h264 is a beast. If you are going to be decoding ANY video in software then you need a CPU that is also a beast. Doing it half-arsed won't help. If you don't put a fast CPU in the thing you might as well just use an Atom or even an ARM.
> Does anything decode video in software any more?
> Thought it was always handled in the GPU (and if it
> isn't it bloody well should be).
Do you use Flash?
Then more likely than not, you are video decode in software.
This is why everyone hates on Flash.
Although hardware decoding in general has it's limits as it's much easier to change software and it's pretty easy to throw a GPU something it can't handle.
h264 shares a lot with DNLA in terms of being a standard that everyone is free to implement in their own way.
"If you don't put a fast CPU in the thing you might as well just use an Atom or even an ARM."
That's odd. I must be imagining my lowly little Atom based netbook, with the standard intel graphics, playing 720p video (upscaled to 1080p by the netbook, not the TV). It will, at a push, do 1080p video but that has to use the right codec and only with (the ancient Microsoft) MPlayer2.
And I thought Linux users were above the "Solve everything by chucking more power at it" mentality?!
> And I thought Linux users were above the "Solve
> everything by chucking more power at it" mentality?!
We are. You just have to be smart about how you throw the "power" around.
It's not the CPU that does the real work on these kinds of boxes. It wouldn't even be doing the real work if you were using a recent Mac Mini. All the heavy lifting would be done by the GPU.
They very expensive supercomputing setups out of nothing more than a big tower and a bunch of GPU cards.
Even Flash can will the GPU if the webmaster in question bothers to enable newer features in the plugin.
I think it's a neat idea, at least for constrained devices. I can't say I think much at all of the price at all. You can have a media player for 1/6th the price and spend the rest on a decent laptop.
Even if you absolutely need some kind of computer thru TV functionality, it shouldn't cost that much. If a netbook retails for £250 (they do), then a PC media device should cost the same or less even.
After all the savings on the keyboard, battery, lcd would offset the cost of a remote keyboard and larger storage. I expect the most recent atom processors are quite capable of 1080p output.
not that good for the cash.
as people said before its expensive for what it is.
you could even go for a ps3 with the tv tuner thingy for £300
you are far better off with standalone devices, usually i find. even if you dont want v+ or sky+ you can get a hd freeview box, ps3 and a nas for much less.
"there’s only a single tuner, so you can’t watch one channel while recording another" what a load of bollocks, when its recording something from its own built in tuner whats to stop u watching something else on the tuner that built into your TV ???
Perhaps the TV doesn't have a built in tuner.
Perhaps the TV isn't a TV at all, but a monitor.
Perhaps you want to record more than one program.
£600, I'd expect the thing to have dual tuners. Especially when dual tuner cards are pretty cheap thesedays.
I suppose you could attach a USB tuner to work around the problem, but you shouldn't have to.
A lot of old plasma displays are just that - displays (*not* TV's). However, with a single tuner it should be possible to record multiple shows assuming they share the same multiplex. At least, MythTV allows this. I assume MythTV runs on this, hence the choice of Nvidia (with hopefully VDPAU support)?