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Clear.fi is Acer’s wireless sharing technology, designed by Cyberlink, which can connect up pretty much any DLNA-certified content sources and display them on your TV. It managed to take shared content from networked PCs and a Nas without problem and you can transfer clear.fi drivers from a USB drive for any awkward devices.
Turn on, tune in and fork out
PC Mark Vantage results don’t show anything particularly startling for the Revo 100, which is slower in some areas than a typical notebook. However, it did well enough in the Comms and TV & Music categories to demonstrate where its strengths lie and it is near silent in use, except when the Blu-ray drive’s running. As a media PC, it’s closer to doing what’s needed than any Atom-based machine I’ve seen.
All that’s left is to wonder about the pricing. Yes this is a fully functional PC and copies of Windows 7 Home Premium don’t come cheap, even for OEMs. However, you can get a Blu-ray player, like Samsung’s BD-C8200, with most of the features of this PC, a lot cheaper.
Verdict
Do you pay £600 for a Windows 7 based media PC with Blu-ray, Freeview, PVR, 3D and wireless for Internet, or £350 for a standalone player with Blu-ray, Freeview, PVR and wireless for Internet. The decision to buy a Revo 100 comes down to whether you need the other facilities of a Windows PC in the living room. ®
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COMMENTS
Tesco ?
Curious, which Tesco model are you describing?
Tuners...
A lot of old plasma displays are just that - displays (*not* TV's). However, with a single tuner it should be possible to record multiple shows assuming they share the same multiplex. At least, MythTV allows this. I assume MythTV runs on this, hence the choice of Nvidia (with hopefully VDPAU support)?
Flash has the ability to be HW accelerated
> Flash has the ability to be HW accelerated
Yes. But you are not the one in control of this if you are using Flash.
This is why most Flash video still sucks.
@JEDDIDIAIAHAH
Flash has the ability to be HW accelerated - there are apis for doing it. Whether those APIs are used is another matter though.
And a decent GPU will handle most stuff (the one I work on does H264, 263, WebMM, MPEG, JPG etc)
Hiding in the tall grass.
> And I thought Linux users were above the "Solve
> everything by chucking more power at it" mentality?!
We are. You just have to be smart about how you throw the "power" around.
It's not the CPU that does the real work on these kinds of boxes. It wouldn't even be doing the real work if you were using a recent Mac Mini. All the heavy lifting would be done by the GPU.
They very expensive supercomputing setups out of nothing more than a big tower and a bunch of GPU cards.
Even Flash can will the GPU if the webmaster in question bothers to enable newer features in the plugin.
