[mythtv-users] First Nvidia Ion box - Acer Aspire Revo prices revealed

[Glen Sagers]

Johnny wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 3:17 PM, jedi <jedi at mishnet.org> wrote:
>> On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 08:49:31AM -0700, John Andrunas wrote:
>>> unboxing!
>>>
>>> http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/16/acer-apire-revo-the-ion-infused-unboxing/
>> It looks like the CPU isn't quite up to snuff.
>>
>> That's too bad. It looks very promising otherwise.
>>
> 
> That is kind of the point to the ION platform. The CPU is low power
> (in both senses of the word), but you have a GPU that is powerful
> enough to play HD video. So it is true that if you are doing anything
> that requires much CPU then none of the ION platform machines will
> likely be useful to you. But for folks who just want to run a frontend
> that plays back recorded TV and their video library, then VDPAU can do
> all of that very nicely (with exceptions if you have some odd codecs
> in your video library). The problem they report with HULU is because
> Flash doesn't support VDPAU (although moonlight has added VDPAU
> support). Somebody has opened a ticket with Adobe requesting VDPAU
> support (http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-1152). Hopefully it will
> come more quickly than 64-bit support did.

Can't speak for the ION platform, but the Atom's are very capable CPUs.
  No, they're not as beefy as normal desktop or laptop processors, but I
have a Dell mini-9, which has an integrated Intel chipset (GMA950) and
have used it with VMware, to run simple MSOffice tasks in some
situations where OpenOffice.org wouldn't do.  It's certainly usable,
didn't feel like it lagged.  There are certainly CPU-intensive tasks it
won't do well, but for general use, it's great.

In terms of video, I use the mini-9 as a frontend.  It plays back
standard definition MPEG2 video from any source (Analog pvrX50, DVD), or
DVDs encoded to XVid AVI at high bitrates with no problem.  It chokes on
HD video from a HDHomerun, although I haven't experimented to see
whether there might be some lower resolution shows it can play (since
not all digital streams are 1080 streams).

Overall, I'm very impressed with the Atom, but it does have some
limitations.  Hopefully the ION is the perfect pairing for HD video.

Glen