I'm looking to add a relatively inexpensive XBMC client in our media room to stream movies (1080P) and TV shows from my NAS to our projector. No gaming or steaming, just watching movies/TV shows. I'm also looking for it to be as quiet as possible without spending too much.
Does anybody have any feedback on either of these two units? Thanks!
The Asus Chromebox is fast and quiet when loaded with the OpenELEC version of XBMC. The cheapest Celeron version with 2GB of Memory is plenty capable of doing what you would like and then some.
I wish I had 4 of them.
Chromebox very neat and quiet. Only issue at the moment is the Intel driver bug that causes Haswell GPUs to hang occasionally on certain content. No remote power on is the only real limitation. The internal 16GB SSD means it boots OpenElec very quickly.
(2014-07-29, 19:37)noggin Wrote: [ -> ]Chromebox very neat and quiet. Only issue at the moment is the Intel driver bug that causes Haswell GPUs to hang occasionally on certain content.
which, from the mailing list, seems like Intel is actually looking into. Basically the GPU is hanging on a decoding error, rather than quickly moving on (eg, dropping the frame, like the Windows drivers do).
(2014-07-29, 19:41)Matt Devo Wrote: [ -> ] (2014-07-29, 19:37)noggin Wrote: [ -> ]Chromebox very neat and quiet. Only issue at the moment is the Intel driver bug that causes Haswell GPUs to hang occasionally on certain content.
which, from the mailing list, seems like Intel is actually looking into. Basically the GPU is hanging on a decoding error, rather than quickly moving on (eg, dropping the frame, like the Windows drivers do).
Yay!
Interestingly one of the clips it universally hangs on in my collection is something I encoded myself with x264 or Adobe Encore (can't remember) - so should be fully H264 compliant and not trigger an error in the first place?