[nonoitall]

Hi. I was considering getting one of the Aspire Revo AR1600-U910H's that are going for the tempting price of $200. We will mostly be using it for playing standard definition XviD videos and DVDs, with the possibility of some HD x264 encodes as well. I doubt we'll be using Hulu though, so I'm guessing its specs should be adequate for what we have in mind?

It might be handy to play some YouTube clips on it though, and so I'm kind of wondering how it would handle that. I know the flash player used in browsers is notoriously slow, but what if one were to save the FLV/MP4 videos offline and play them with MPlayer?

Finally, I was planning on using an ARC-1100 remote/receiver with it and wanted to know if the Revo supports waking up on USB events?

(Just as a side note, my research has lead me to the conclusion that XBMC currently only supports hardware accelerated video decoding on Linux, which should not be a problem for me, as I have a fair amount of Linux experience under my belt.)

EDIT: I know the Revo doesn't have a built-in optical drive, but I may end up getting an external one later, or use it to play back DVD images, hence my mentioning DVD playback.

[Andy2222]

Hi. I was considering getting one of the Aspire Revo AR1600-U910H's that are going for the tempting price of $200. We will mostly be using it for playing standard definition XviD videos and DVDs, with the possibility of some HD x264 encodes as well. I doubt we'll be using Hulu though, so I'm guessing its specs should be adequate for what we have in mind?

It might be handy to play some YouTube clips on it though, and so I'm kind of wondering how it would handle that. I know the flash player used in browsers is notoriously slow, but what if one were to save the FLV/MP4 videos offline and play them with MPlayer?

Finally, I was planning on using an ARC-1100 remote/receiver with it and wanted to know if the Revo supports waking up on USB events?

(Just as a side note, my research has lead me to the conclusion that XBMC currently only supports hardware accelerated video decoding on Linux, which should not be a problem for me, as I have a fair amount of Linux experience under my belt.)

EDIT: I know the Revo doesn't have a built-in optical drive, but I may end up getting an external one later, or use it to play back DVD images, hence my mentioning DVD playback.

I guess playing saved FLV files should be fine using mplayer, but youtube or hulu will not working.
I still have lots of hickups using hulu 360/480p on a dual atom 330 clocked to 2.1GHz, with both cores at 90-99% usage always.
But there are rumors that adobe may release a gpu accelerated version next year, but i would not count on it.

As comparison netflix is using silverlight, which is gpu accelerated. So my cpu usage is at 15-30% on both cores, while playing a netflix movie at highest quality.


If u can live without flash than this 230 atom + ION is really a nice HTPC, also the ION LE is basically the normal ION without directx10. So for HTPC usage it makes no difference.


PS: Be aware of the fact that VDPAU wont always work. So there may be cases where your h264 file wont play using GPU acc. Mainly anime tend to use incompatible streams often. So for 720p h264 content the single atom wont work, for xvid i guess its oki with 480p encodes.

[nonoitall]

Hmm, so in contrast, can a dual-core Atom decode 720p H.264 content completely in software?

(Anyone know about whether or not the Revo wakes on USB?)

[tfieldho]

(Anyone know about whether or not the Revo wakes on USB?)

Yes. The Revo has a BIOS setting for wake on USB keyboard/mouse. I have a MCE IR receiver hooked up and the remote will wake the box out of standby.

The one setting you'll want to be mindful of is Settings - System - Hardware - Shutdown function. If you set this to Standby then the power button on the remote will send the system to standby. If you leave it at the default setting of shutdown then you'll be getting your butt up off the couch to hit the power button to turn it back on. Not sure if it makes a difference, but in case it does I'm running XBMC Live off a USB stick.

[geminiwave]

PS: Be aware of the fact that VDPAU wont always work. So there may be cases where your h264 file wont play using GPU acc. Mainly anime tend to use incompatible streams often. So for 720p h264 content the single atom wont work, for xvid i guess its oki with 480p encodes.

Can anyone else confirm this? This would be a deal killer for me. I uh...like anime

[Birtybasset]

Yes. The Revo has a BIOS setting for wake on USB keyboard/mouse. I have a MCE IR receiver hooked up and the remote will wake the box out of standby.

The one setting you'll want to be mindful of is Settings - System - Hardware - Shutdown function. If you set this to Standby then the power button on the remote will send the system to standby. If you leave it at the default setting of shutdown then you'll be getting your butt up off the couch to hit the power button to turn it back on. Not sure if it makes a difference, but in case it does I'm running XBMC Live off a USB stick.

Has anyone managed to configure it so you can do a cold boot (rather than from standby) from the remote? I use one of these so standby is not as option as when I turn off my TV it cuts the power to all but my Sky+ box. I suppose I might have to just plug it into perm live socket and use standby.

[Scott R]

Anyone getting their Revo to successfully wake via USB under Windows XP? If so, how do you have to configure this to get it to work?