Pretty amusing for the techie types

[cfb]

:tux:

I'm sure someone else somewhere may have tried this and gotten it to work, but I thought it'd be fun to throw out there for some peoples amusement.

I recently picked up an acer aspire revo, which is a tiny little box with a single core Atom netbook processor in it coupled with an nvidia ion graphics chip, which is a pretty decent gpu, basically a slightly cut back nvidia 9400. Decodes every video format you can throw at it without much help from the poor little Atom.

So I was wondering if it'd run Directv2pc, which specifies a pretty strong cpu...

The advisor program greyed out the cpu saying it was 'unknown'. Fair enough...everything else was green.

After installing the program, it came up and asked me which dvr to use, took a real long time compared to our core 2 duo laptops. Hung. I closed it and ran it again. Gave me the program list the second time, then some weird error when I ran it.

Third time was the charm. Pulled up the program list and smoothly played both SD and HD content just fine. It was great after that except it takes a long time to come up and let you pick the receiver/get the program list.

Really surprising for a cpu that pretty much runs at the performance level of a pentium 3 from 10+ years ago, glued to a half decent modern but low end GPU.

So I guess the lesson learned is that the cpu doesnt matter that much with directv2pc. But a solid GPU does.

Oh, and I think I heard lots of dog-like whining noises from the cpu at several intervals and a little whimpering

 

[htguy]

:tux:

I'm sure someone else somewhere may have tried this and gotten it to work, but I thought it'd be fun to throw out there for some peoples amusement.

I recently picked up an acer aspire revo, which is a tiny little box with a single core Atom netbook processor in it coupled with an nvidia ion graphics chip, which is a pretty decent gpu, basically a slightly cut back nvidia 9400. Decodes every video format you can throw at it without much help from the poor little Atom.

So I was wondering if it'd run Directv2pc, which specifies a pretty strong cpu...

The advisor program greyed out the cpu saying it was 'unknown'. Fair enough...everything else was green.

After installing the program, it came up and asked me which dvr to use, took a real long time compared to our core 2 duo laptops. Hung. I closed it and ran it again. Gave me the program list the second time, then some weird error when I ran it.

Third time was the charm. Pulled up the program list and smoothly played both SD and HD content just fine. It was great after that except it takes a long time to come up and let you pick the receiver/get the program list.

Really surprising for a cpu that pretty much runs at the performance level of a pentium 3 from 10+ years ago, glued to a half decent modern but low end GPU.

So I guess the lesson learned is that the cpu doesnt matter that much with directv2pc. But a solid GPU does.

Oh, and I think I heard lots of dog-like whining noises from the cpu at several intervals and a little whimpering

You sure that sound you heard wasn't the power supply? You have minimal power requirements with that equipment but power supplies sound funny when stressed.

 

[cfb]

Nope, I had to open the box and wipe some tears away from the cpu afterwards

It uses a little power brick, no internal supply.

Not a bad little 'extra' htpc. We have a big one in the living room but I get kicked out every once in a while and wanted something to use in the bedroom. $150 as a refurb, but it looked like new.

Tweaked up windows xp a little to pare back all the unnecessary stuff, services and whatnot, put the free mpc-hc player on it, set a network drive to the big computer downstairs and voila...

Makes little to no noise, draws very little power, makes no measurable heat, has no trouble decoding mpeg2/h.264 and most anything in between that can be decoded in hardware. Tucked it behind the tv, completely invisible.