[mythtv-users] Alternative to Mac Mini?

Jarod Wilson jarod at wilsonet.com
Tue Jul 27 22:26:47 UTC 2010


On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 12:08 PM, Matt Emmott <memmott at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 11:43 AM, Jarod Wilson <jarod at wilsonet.com> wrote:
>> On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 5:44 AM, Jean-Yves Avenard <jyavenard at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Hi
>>>
>>> On 27 July 2010 05:21, Jarod Wilson <jarod at wilsonet.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Seriously, what, in a similar form-factor, besides the Dell Studio
>>>> Hybrid and Dell Zino HD (neither of which has nvidia graphics)
>>>> actually comes close to competing with the new mac mini? If ATI
>>>> graphics didn't blow chunks, the Zino would be interesting, though I'm
>>>> not sure an athlon neo is any better than an intel atom.
>>>
>>> I tried to look at a Dell Studio Hybrid, I couldn't find it
>>> anywhere... All links are over a year old
>>>
>>> It seems to me that Dell discontinued it.
>>
>> D'oh, didn't know that. I had one, but sold it on the cheap to a buddy
>> of mine to finance one of my ion purchases. :)
>>
>> It was a core 2 duo at 2.2GHz or so, took laptop so-dimms, laptop hard
>> drive and dvd burner, internal mini pcie wifi and a second internal
>> mini pcie slot for a "Broadcom BD Accelerator" (which was just a
>> Broadcom Crystal HD w/firmware that enables BD support -- came bundled
>> if you upgraded the dvd burner to a bd drive), intel x3100 integrated
>> graphics (I can't recall if it had hdmi, but definitely dvi and
>> optical audio), onboard firewire, external power brick, etc. However,
>> it wasn't much cheaper (and was definitely larger and a bit louder)
>> than a mac mini.
>>
>> --
>
> I believe the Studio hybrids have 2 mini-PCIe slots onboard. One is
> used by the wireless card but I think the other one is free.

Uh. That's exactly what I said. :)

> If
> Broadcom CrystalHD support makes it into .24 then you can get full
> 1080p for another $50. Of course, once the CHD card gets Myth support
> it pretty much changes everything, since with a PCIe adapter you can
> drop it in any machine made in the last 3 years or so.

Yup. The driver still needs a bit of work, but its working pretty well
with totem, xine and xbmc these days. Ran out of time to work on
mythtv support for it myself, Janne was working on it a bit though.
Not sure how far along things are. Some massive library and driver
updates to add support for the bcm970015 kinda destabilized things for
a bit, but we're starting to level off again. Then its back to
clean-ups so I can send the 15 kernel-level support upstream...

-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod at wilsonet.com


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