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Mini-Box M-100
Craig Mctavern submits this link to a blurb about the Mini-Box M-100 small form-factor computer. Looks tailor-made for a home audio/visual system.
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The Mini-ITX boards were reviewed on Tom's Hardware not long ago here
puts ("Python r0cks\n");
As for me, next week the birthday elf is gonna bring me a Shuttle SN41G2 and a Athlon 2800+ Barton core CPU -- or I'm going to hunt that little shit down and kick his ass. Santa didn't bring me a tiny PC and it nearly cost him his life. He got to walk away with only having lost two reindeer. The elf ain't going to be so lucky. So pony up with the SFF computer or watch your back...
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
It isn't that much smaller than the iDot mini-ITX machines (I'm just a customer, I've bought a bunch for various embedded applications), which, by the time you stuff in some RAM you had lying around anyway are under $200. If you're going to spend an extra $295 for a display and a few buttons, going super small and super low power with one of the gazillion PC104 vendors seems smarter.
In my house we have two laptops with 802.11b that are almost always close at hand, so running the whole thing headless and just using one of those laptops with a web browser to control the media center seems like the obvious choice.
I need to finish up with code for the web server and media play control, but I've got some instructions on building one of these to boot off CompactFlash into stripped down Linux if anyone cares.
The Minibox seems to run the EPIA-M motherboards from VIA with either their 600Mhz Eden or faster C3 processors. The EPIA-M motherboards support direct MPEG-2 playback so DVD playback should be no problem. For more info on Mini-Itx stuff check out mini-itx's website.
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
"...and does floating point, so Ogg is possible."
If you will recall, the XIPH team re-wrote the Ogg decoder so that it can run on systems that can only do integer math. "Several optimizations were made that resulted in the decoder being twice as fast. We've also tuned the code to be tolerant for those who implement Vorbis using integer-only math. This allows hardware and embedded devices to more easily support Ogg Vorbis playback." http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=4416.
EPIA-M with 600Mhz processor - $150
Ugly but quiet case - $50
Harddisk - $80
128Mhz RAM - $30
total - 310$. Note that I left out the CDROM/DVDROM drive. This is because the EPIA-M supports boot from network. If you really want one you could spend another 20$ for a generic.
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
I assume we're talking about Vorbis, the audio codec of the Ogg family. AFAIK, the integer-only codec is separate from the main Vorbis code and called Tremor (I hope the name has nothing to do with sound quality). There are good reasons why these codecs are mainly developed for FP math; for example modern processors are faster with FP as they are optimized for modern software (a kind of reverse chicken and ogg problem :-).
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
There's a castlerock driver in xfree 86. Now. Finally.
:)
We're talking five days ago, mind. So don't feel so bad
Two things of interest:
1, The driver is a result of via and Alan Cox working together.
2, Alan has been using an epia as his main box, and I quote:
"I have two boxes with the relevant hardware. One of them is my desktop box and I've been running the driver as my main desktop for a couple of weeks now."
Seal of approval, if ever I saw one.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.