[mythtv-users] koolu as a mythbox?

[Sarah Hayes]

Steve Peters - Priority Electronics wrote:
> Has anyone on the list used the koolu (koolu.com) as their mythfrontend?
>  
> It seems pretty decent, and at $299 and silent with no fan and 80gb 
> and 512mb with Ubuntu loaded, seems like a pretty good deal. I've 
> heard talk of an apple tv, but this thing seems better than the apple 
> tv for myth purposes. You could probably up it to 1gb, add an external 
> hard drive and use it as a mythbackend too.
>  
> Just curious
> -Steve
I think it would struggle.  One thing I have learned from my experience 
of the VIA C3 processors is "quiet, low power" = "extreme gutlessness".  
A 500Mhz processor could well do SD-MPEG2 but I suspect you'd need 
accelerator hardware for DivX, h264 and so on even at SD resolutions.

Oddly enough you could probably scrapheap challenge something a wee bit 
more powerful from fleabay, freecycle, local free ads paper and being 
inventive for about the same price (Athlon of some description, PC133 
SDRAM and so on) which whilst still being SD will playback 'everything'.

AFIC the Apple TV is using Intel's previous (or latest) generation of 
single core mobile chips... it's apparently rather potent and HD capable.