On Sat, 17 Nov 2012 10:59:28 -0800 Grant <[email protected]> wrote:
> Which of these would be the best choice for Gentoo? I have a > Beaglebone but now I'm looking for something with video for HD > playback. > > - Grant I'd say none of them (yet). It doesn't matter what other features in the form of fancy IO and neat circuitry is put on such boards, they are all limited by what the CPU can do. If the board has a RealTek chip, it;s limited by what the RealTek dev software provides. I have a Raspberry Pi, and doing what it was designed to do is something it is very good at. It was designed to teach kids how to program. It was not designed to play full HD video. The Pi suffers with playback the very same way all the other ARM media players out there suffer, whether they be AC Ryan, Medi8ter, Xtreamer or whatever - as soon as you have to run some controlling software as well as the codec, and especially if you have to decode audio on the device (as opposed to having the amp do it in hardware), it stutters. The cpu just cannot cut it. The next generation of ARM chips and software are reputed to be beefed up to deal with this very issue, and Google will turn up many valid opinions about this. Meanwhile, you can get it to work, just be aware things are not 100% there yet (for reasonable definitions of "there" starting with 720p). The cheapest solution by far and the easiest to get working is a Raspberry Pi and an OpenElec built for it. You need one 30 bucks Pi,one HDMI tv and one ultra cheap SD card and you are good to go ;-) -- Alan McKinnon [email protected]
