[olug] Tiny computers

[nate]

On Mon, Apr 05, 2010 at 04:33:35PM -0500, Craig Wolf wrote:
> What about the Aspire Revo R3610/3612/3622??
>  
> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883103235&nm_mc=OTC-Froogle&cm_mmc=OTC-Froogle-_-Desktop+PC-_-Acer+America-_-83103235
>  
> Comes with a mount to put it on the back of an LCD TV.

Yes that is the stuff I am talking about.

The Atom is slow, but the Nvidia ION chipset gives good performance for
software that supports VDPAU.  With applications that support VDPAU and
with properly configured properietary drivers you should have no problem
playing back H.264 high-def video.


Flash is troublesome, unfortunately. If the person is willing to use a
tool like Youtube-dl/Clive/Abby or use a firefox plugin to download
videos and play them back using a seperate media player then it will do
fine. But for 720p and other services like Hulu and Amazon's "Video On
Demand" rental service, then you can run into problems.

For best performance you'd still want to get a Core2Duo system.


But these Revo devices do make compelling set-top-boxes and you can get
remote controls for them if you don't like keyboards and such.

Here is a guide on how to get a Revo system working with Ubuntu 9.10 and
Boxee:
http://www.greenhughes.com/content/how-install-ubuntu-910-and-boxee-beta-acer-aspire-revo-including-64-bit-option

Here is a video of a Revo system running XBMCbuntu:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rf5h6QxFleE

However... it's not really for a non-Linux type of guy. I would not set
it up for somebody without being willing to come in and provide support
for them. If you read the stuff I linked to you'd see that it does
require some setup and knowledge of Linux. 

Windows 7 is not bad though. Most of this stuff is cross-platform and
can happily run on Windows 7. 

If that is a problem then PS3 would probably be nice. I donno. I just
know that while I like my PS3 for playing games, I prefer Linux for
watching videos and such.