Joined on 03/22/11
Great little computer
Pros: Fanless, can play high bit rate 1080p h264, linux friendly and all the hardware execpt VAAPI worked out of the box. See other thoughts for that
Cons: wifi card is a bit weak, can freeze for a moment when the cpu max's out.
Overall Review: I installed xubuntu 12.04 on this computer with XBMC to use it as a HTPC for my father. At first I was abit disappoint that with the playback of the video but after playing around with the box for abit I discovered that VAAPI (hardware video decoding) was not enabled by default in ubuntu. If you run vainfo from the command line and VAAPI is working you should get VAProfileH264High : VAEntrypointVLD VAProfileVC1Advanced : VAEntrypointVLD else you need to run the following command to get VAAPI working sudo apt-get install libva1 vainfo xvba-va-driver after that the video playback worked great and playing 1080p high bit rate h264 videos in XBMC worked great with a cpu usage of 35-40%
mostly usable but it takes some work
Pros: small form factor low power usage low noise
Cons: GPU sucks low GPU memory built in N wifi is too slow to stream HD content it's a pain to get video playback working well with linux
Overall Review: I bought this computer to use as a mythtv frontend and installed ubuntu 12.04. The default drivers in the ubnuntu repo caused all sorts of lock ups and visual error when running so I ended up using the newest AMD drivers which seemed to fix most of that up, however when running at 1080i res you still get visual errors and you pretty much have to disable any opengl content else it will lock up sooner of later. The built in wifi N is really too slow to stream any HD content so I plugged in a USB wifi N doogle and that seemed to fix that problem I read in the reviews that people can play 1080 HD content on this computer which is true, however that will only work if the video codec is a TS or PS stearm (normal OTA video with low compression), if the video codec is H264 (high compression) the computer will not be able to play any hd content (1080i/p or 720p) I also read in some of the reviews that people have been removing the internal wifi card and replacing it with a crystal hd card to improve the video play back so I purchased one. Hopefully that will get H264 content to play well. one last thing, if you are going to install linux on this computer you really need to add the following lines to your xorg.conf file to make the video playback usable Option "VideoOverlay" "off" Option "TexturedVideo" "on" Option "OpenGLOverlay" "off" Option "TexturedVideoSync" "on"
great laptopru
Pros: Great little laptop computer. Long battery life can run linux with cutron
Cons: can't wipe chromeos to install linux.
Overall Review: It runs ubuntu linux runs really well with curton. everything in ubuntu function like you expect. You just have to run chromeos and ubuntu side by side but as it turns out that really isn't a bad thing. Its using the same kernel so there isn't any performance hits. Battery life is about 13 hours and it is very light. The only thing if you install curton and ubuntu is the default install is very bare bones so you will have to install alot of packages to get everything going. For example for printing you will need to install cups.
does not work
Pros: can be used as paper weight
Cons: unit is doa. Tried on XP and couldn't get it to work... $10 in shipping to return it..... never buying avermedia again
Great Box!
Pros: -everything works with linux out of the box (wifi, hdmi audio, video, bluetooth, etc...) -foss AMD driver and VDPAU hardware decoding works for great video play back -quad core -quiet -low power usage, uses 19 watts :) -usb 3 ports
Cons: -only msata drives, unless you use external usb drives -uses 1.35 volt memory -no spif port -no esata port
Overall Review: I am using this as a combo mythtv frontend and backend with ubuntu 14.04 as the os. It has more then enough power to do these jobs without any problems. The video play back with VDPAU and mythtv 0.27.1 works great for mpeg-2 and h264 content 720p, 1080i, and 1080p. The only thing right now is the foss drivers only allow for 2x temperoal hardware deinterlacing for 1080i content. However all video is shape and smooth as silk. Just remember you need to install vdpau to hardware decoding, you can check to see if it working my running vdpauinfo in the command line
works great
Pros: Low cost, high preformance, works with linux,
Cons: none
Overall Review: Reads and writes to my SD cards are the rated speed of the card with no issues at all. I am getting around ~17 mb/s of read speed from my SD cards. The read speeds vary from card to card but thats a pretty good average