Samsung Chromebox

Drewdah:
Other than the chromium side of the OS, as a XBMC device, do you see any advantages over Roku, AppleTV, Boxee, Popcorn Hour etc?

(2012-07-10 16:26)onizuka Wrote:  It's being reported that there's no audio coming from the DisplayPort......THAT'S RIDICULOUS. I have no idea why anyone would want to buy this now...having to plug in a 3.5mm splitter from the front of it for analog sound is absurd. I hope Samsung fixes this with a firmware update. It's bad enough you need to purchase a HDMI to DP adapter.

I agree that Samsung should have included an optical and/or SPDIF header, but, you are whining about an 8 dollar adapter on a ~350 dollar item...really??

Apparently you didn't read my comment correctly. No audio through the display port is a deal breaker. Forget about your monoprice adapter, we're talking about a $350+ device that doesn't (or at the time of my original posting) provide any digital audio. No HDMI port is a compromise. No digital audio through any means the device has is again, RIDICULOUS. Not "whining" my friend, this is facts.

I get beautiful sound from my ChromeBox DisplayPort. I use a Siig DisplayPort to HDMI adapter and an HDMI cable plugged into my TV. Try ctrl-F4 to see your display settings.

I can confirm that there is sound through the DisplayPort. I'm using the cheapest DisplayPort to HDMI cable I found from the local electronics store. Works perfectly even through the amplifier.

Has anyone tried running XBMCbuntu on it?

(2012-08-27 03:15)poldim Wrote:  Drewdah:
Other than the chromium side of the OS, as a XBMC device, do you see any advantages over Roku, AppleTV, Boxee, Popcorn Hour etc?

To be honest, I'm not sure there are any XBMC specific advantages, but the Chromebox has a nice core i5 processor, 4 gigs of ram and a decent sized SSD which means it's got much more speed / power potential than the others you listed. For me and about 5000 other people who went to Google I/O this year the Chromebox was free, which is why I've been trying to see if it could make it a decent HTPC. I don't know that I would buy one specifically for this purpose, but since I have one it was worth trying to repurpose it.

I've been busy at work for the past few months and haven't spent much time working with it, but now my PS3 is starting to show signs of death so I need to find something else to view my media from. I ordered one of those DisplayPort to HDMI adapters from Monoprice and will see how that works when it gets here.

It is a powerful little box, but I wish that it included an HDMI port for bitstreaming HD audio instead of displayport....