[ale] OT: Neat media pc

[Brian Pitts]

If anyone is looking for a low cost, low power PC that can be easily
hidden by their television to play back HD video, today I stumbled
across something [0] that seems to fit the bill- the Fit-PC2. It's tiny
(4" x 4.5" x 1.05", 13 ounces), fanless, and only uses 8W of power at
full load. Pricing starts at $245 without a hard disk or wifi. With both
of those and Ubuntu installed, the cost is $360. The specifications are
below:

Intel Atom Z510 (1.1 Ghz) or Z530 (1.6 Ghz) CPU
Intel US15W chipset (aka Poulsbo)
GMA 500 video
1GB DDR2-533 RAM
Internal bay for 2.5" SATA HDD
miniSD socket
Line-out, line-in, mic
1000 BaseT Ethernet
802.11g WLAN
6 USB 2.0 High Speed ports
Programmable consumer IR receiver
Bootable from HDD, USB thumb drive, USB CDROM, USB hard disk, over network

The neat thing about the Poulsbo chipset is that the GPU can be used to
accelerate decoding MPEG-4 video if you use software that supports VA
API [1] and you can stomach binary blobs [2]. Supposedly 1080P h.264
playback uses less than 50% of the cpu

The only weird thing about it is that it uses an HDMI connector for the
video output, but not the audio.

[0] http://fit-pc2.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VA_API
[2] http://gma500.wiki-site.com/index.php/Main_Page

-- 
All the best,
Brian Pitts