On 23/02/2011 21:48, Bill Burroughs wrote: > Hi all, > > I had been using Freevo for almost 4 years until about 4 months ago - I got a > 720p TV, and as my Freevo box wasn't powerful enough to decode 720p, I bought > myself a cheap little (Argosy) media box. Needless to say, losing the > ability > to customise things has got more and more annoying over the last 4 months, > and > I'm now so frustrated with it, and so underwhelmed by 720p, that I'm giving > up > on it. My freevo box is still in only a few pieces (4 months is a long time > to > go without opening up an unused piece of hardware), so won't take me long to > throw it back together, and I was thinking of just wiping the HD, and > installing OS and freevo from scratch.
From an HD playback perspective, the processor etc. isn't that important, what you really need is a graphics card that will offload the HD processing. I have an ASRock Ion330, it's a dual core Atom but it has the Nvidia ION graphics which mplayer can use to offload HD playback, so I can playback 1080p using about 5-10% cpu :D. Worth noting if you are going down the HD route an NVidia card that you can off-load too would be a pretty cheap addition if you can fit it in your box. There are even fanless versions that can do a lot of HD decoding. > The question is, why choose Freevo over XBMC? I know under > normal circumstances a question like this to an OSS mailing list will end up > in > an endless stream of flames, and in those situations I would normally > sirupticiously defect without anyone knowing or caring. However, I've found > the Freevo lists to be very friendly and fair over the years, so I thought I > would throw it out to an open conversation to see what happened. I've tried XBMC on the same piece of hardware. It kept producing lots of errors, although the interface was very slick. The biggest bonus I see of XBMC is that it has fast forward and rewind controls that work properly (not the stupid mplayer/xine skip forward+back controls). It took me a long time going through the menus trying to configure things properly but it all worked reasonably well. Having said that I abandoned it purely from the perspective of TV recording, which of course it can't do! I actually prefer freevo's simpler UI for day to day use, after a while XBMC became a bit of sensory overload! If managed to arrange for decent fast forward and re-wind (maybe steal the XBMC player?) then I would probably having nothing feature wise that I wanted that freevo didn't provide. Not sure how XBMC behaves with things like auto-shutdown on idle etc? Although I guess if recording it's left of an issue ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Free Software Download: Index, Search & Analyze Logs and other IT data in Real-Time with Splunk. Collect, index and harness all the fast moving IT data generated by your applications, servers and devices whether physical, virtual or in the cloud. Deliver compliance at lower cost and gain new business insights. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
