Comment Re:Review misses important point (Score 2, Informative) 64
A box like this has to compete with AppleTV/Xbox on the lowend and mini pc's like the Mac Mini on the highend.
exactly right, and I believe there's a place in the middle. A device with comprehensive playback capabilities (both downloaded content and web video) that operates like a piece of electronics. That's the vision, as many, including the reviewer point out, we're not there yet. We started from the PC side and are evolving to be more electronics like, both software and eventually more stripped down hardware. Our focus since release (and until production- remember this is a gamma product) will be on enhancing the UI for couch use. And, yes it will be a period of experimentation, XBMC, Boxee, Miro all work on the box and are in use by various members of the community. We (neuros) feel this is the sweet spot. No, it's not as cheap (or small) as a straight AppleTV (or the like), and the web interface isn't as couch friendly in the navigation. but its more open, expandable, free standing and comprehensive in terms of access to content and we are working on the shortcomings.
Plus there are ample possibilities for home built machines with integrated chipsets that support full h264 acceleration.
At this point, to a certain extent, you can really view this as a home built effort. It's not home built in the sense you have complete access to all the components, but honestly if there's something you want to customize about it, you can literally buy the parts yourself, or we'll sell you a sub assembly and we've listed all the components line by line on the wiki.
The point is that there are economies of scale of a community working in collaboration directly with the manufacturer on a focused set of hardware. A good example of this is ATI, as mentioned elsewhere, we are working directly with ATI as a customer to solve the issues with the system. I think it stands to reason that we have more influence with ATI as a group than as individual hackers, and in fact you will find ATI/AMD engineers participating directly in our community.
As anyone that's put together one of these systems knows, there are tons of minor details that need to be worked out, and it's vastly more efficient if we join forces on a focused application on a defined hardware platform. That's why we've made sure that engineers at Boxee, XBMC, Miro, etc all have sample hardware.
As mentioned elsewhere the hardware does have direct h264 acceleration and is 1080p capable, athough this has not been full implemented in Linux yet.
Unless it can play bluray rips, $300 isn't a very compelling price for the box. It's more expensive than other CD options and not as capable of the more expensive HD capable alternatives.
ATI is simply the wrong direction to go for a box like this.
the ATI hardware is capable, and believe me, I share the frustration wrt ATI. But understand that we came, like most here, biased against ATI at the outset (and we have ulterior motive or connection with ATI). Despite that, they were able to convince us, both with the offers of support for the project as well as current features that they were the right vendor for this device. This is something we continue to evaluate, but if you do the detailed analysis, there are issues with Linux support for both ATI and nVidia, and either vendor must evolve their Linux performance. The good news is that the playing field for Linux, unlike the desktop, is *vastly * more level on the set-top box side than it is on the desktop. More accurately, slanted to Linux's favor, so I believe this will drive a lot of effort. Obviously the success or failure of this project and those like it will be important too.