[mythtv-users] Popcorn Hour Unit as VIdeo Output?

[R. G. Newbury]

jedi wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 04:32:49PM -0400, R. G. Newbury wrote:
>> An article in this month's Linux Journal is a review of the Popcorn Hour 
>> A-100 Media Tank. A paperback sized box with an embedded (linux??) 
>> control program, intended to play all sorts of video formats, and 
>> apparently capable of doing 1080p with ease, for $200.
>>
>> The corporate site is at popcornhour.com. A newer unit with better 
>> capabilities is now available for $215.
>>
>> A review is at http://www.tvtechnology.com/article/68576
>>
>> This unit can stream videos, with or without an internal hard drive.
>>
>> Does anyone have one of these? Could it be set up and left in a ready 
>> state to stream videos from mythtv...in effect as a video card?
>>
>> The output capabilities of this box, *if reasonably usable with mythtv* 
>> could sidestep a lot of video problems.
> 
>     You still have to deal with video with commercials embedded in them.
> If you're really keen on how MythTV skips through those, and how it 
> presents everything then the popcorn hour is interesting but not quite
> there yet.
> 
>     Something along the lines of a cross between appletv and the popcorn
> hour would be wicked though... IOW, a popcorn hour that could be treated
> as a regular PC through dedicated hacking while still retaining the 
> ability to use the h264 acceleration hw.
> 
>     quad core systems are already starting to get pretty cheap though...

Since posting my question, I saw on the popcorn site that it will accept 
streams from UPnP servers...so it might possibly be used as a 
'video-out' from myth if the mythbox (BE, controlled by separate FE) 
were a UpnP server..(This would invert the usual control structure where 
the video goes through the FE to the screen,,,,), Just wondering..

And would a quad core be twice (ok, 1.8) times "faster" than a core 2 
duo? Is that the sort of jump we should expect? Cause, I guess the 
mythbox motherboard may be mounted in the office desktop sometime pretty 
soon!

Geoff