Boxee drops tegra 2?

With 1080p hardware support for pretty much everything Ion did, I wouldn't say it did less. Internally it probably used a lot of the same decoder hardware, and the A9 was performance wise pretty similar to the Atom (and probably faster then a lot of the single processor Atom boxes people have). I think the real problem is that hardware accelerated flash for linux wasn't going to be ready, which would have killed it (boxee is all about shoving a 100 different flash video streams down your throat).

From what I understood the Tegra is more like a Sigma or Broadcom design- works perfectly with material encoding within normal Blu Ray specs, but falls apart with oddly encoded scene files.

Part of the reason I love my ION box (over my AppleTV + Broadcom or my PCH) is that it plays EVERYTHING I throw at it, including terribly encoded scene stuff. So much good HD material is only available through the scene (aka for older stuff that is not on Blu Ray yet but does play in HD on Showtime), and so much of that stuff is poorly encoded. With ION, I don't care.

As far as the flash thing goes, does this mean that the Intel chip will do the decoding? I was hoping the Boxee folks would help push forward a GPU accelerated Flash for Linux.

poofyhairguy Wrote:From what I understood the Tegra is more like a Sigma or Broadcom design- works perfectly with material encoding within normal Blu Ray specs, but falls apart with oddly encoded scene files.

Yeah sorry missed that. I didn't realize Nvidia had screwed up something on the built in H.264 decoder.

poofyhairguy Wrote:As far as the flash thing goes, does this mean that the Intel chip will do the decoding? I was hoping the Boxee folks would help push forward a GPU accelerated Flash for Linux.

Boxee on my Ion system can't play 480p youtube streams without some dropped frames, so they'll have to have some hardware acceleration, probably both for H.264 decode and for alpha blending and colorspace conversion as well.

FWIW flash on some linux systems is hardware accelerated. Android for instance does almost everything in hardware using whatever DSPs are available. Theres just no general cross-distro way to do it. Probably whatever Boxee was going to do wouldn't have worked on normal linux systems.

Forget about GPU doing video decoding on these type of platforms, there is a dedicated video decoder present on the chipset.

I'm getting one of these. I was worried about the Tegra 2 but I'm for sure getting it now. I would think especially now that it's not arm based and boxee understanding people want some openness running xbmc won't be too far down the pipeline. Well that's my "hope" at least.
Boxee supports xbmc. So I gotta support boxee and put my money where my mouth is.

Why did they have to make it so weird looking? I absolutely hate the odd shape of it. I may get one just because it seems really wife friendly but I'd of preferred just a normal dvd-player type design. Sad to hear about the tegra 2 as I was hoping the next round of tablet PCs with tegra 2 and hdmi out would be win/win.

Robgue Wrote:I'm getting one of these. I was worried about the Tegra 2 but I'm for sure getting it now. I would think especially now that it's not arm based and boxee understanding people want some openness running xbmc won't be too far down the pipeline.

Agreed, being x86 - this new Intel CPU could be the new hope!

Also see that ASUS have a box coming out later on using the same CE4100 CPU

http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/13/asus-...ter-embed/

Running WMCE it's x86 as well.

Sort of makes sense why Intel stunted ION2 like they did if they had this as their new 'media player' CPU in the works.

davilla Wrote:Forget about GPU doing video decoding on these type of platforms, there is a dedicated video decoder present on the chipset.

So it sounds like we are looking at a box like Popcorn hour or Western digital box.

Is it safe to say that the intel board they are using has a sigma or realtek video decoder? Or intels first run at a video decoder? I know we just heard today about the jump, but I figured I would ask.

BORIStheBLADE Wrote:So it sounds like we are looking at a box like Popcorn hour or Western digital box.

Is it safe to say that the intel board they are using has a sigma or realtek video decoder? Or intels first run at a video decoder? I know we just heard today about the jump, but I figured I would ask.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3912/boxee...side-story

They claim it's likely a Imagination Technologies PowerVR series decoder which would match the GPU.

Looking at the block diagram for the CE4100, the Multi-Format HW Decoder, Display Processor and Graphics Processor are all inside a block. This suggests they might be related. Since only one has any number ( SGX535 ), this suggests Imagination Technologies is involved.