Acer Revo (was Re:NCIX grand opening sale)

[William Park]

Hi Hugh,

Question:
    If Acer Revo R1600 can be MythTV frontend, then, by definition, can
    it also be used as MythTV backend?  From what I read, backend
    doesn't have to encode MPEG-2, since ATSC is already MPEG-2 encoded.
    It just have to save the TV stream coming from TV tuner to disk.

-- 
William

On Sun, Aug 29, 2010 at 01:55:08PM -0400, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> I did buy an Acer Revo R1600 from NCIX on the last day before HST
> ($200).  That one (our second) we use mounted on the back of a 19" LCD
> monitor (it comes with a cradle for attaching to the VESA mountpoints;
> some monitors allow this but others use that to attach their stand).
> 
> We use another Acer Revo r1600 as a MythTV front-end.  We actually use XMBC
> because it can talk to my two backends that are running different revs
> of Myth.  The r1600 might be a better choice than the r3610:
> 
> + significantly cheaper normally
> 
> - 1G of RAM is a bit light these days, but OK.  I added 1G since I had
>   a cheap stick laying about
> 
> + comes without MS Windows
> 
> + comes with FreeDOS!
> 
> - comes without Linux, even though it is advertised as "Linux boot"
> 
> + no trouble running Ubuntu.  Except for the wireless which needs a
>   tiny obscure kludge.
> 
> - smaller disk (who cares; if you need lots of space for videos, use eSata 
>   to add bulk storage)
> 
> - slightly crippled ION LE processor.  No affect on Linux, as far as I
>   know.  In MS Windows, I understand that there is a hack to avoid the
>   crippling of Direct X 10.
> 
> + might run cooler since the r1600 has a single core Atom rather than
>   two.  I intend to measure that.
> 
> - some tasks might run more slowly due to the single core Atom, but
>   probably not front-end tasks.  If you care about CPU performance,
>   Atom isn't great anyway.

--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists