[Frigo]

For USD $150 (or less?) you can today buy a Bay trail tablet with:

Intel Atom Z37xx
mini HDMI out
2 gb ram
32-64 gb storage (+micro sd slot)
Bluetooth
802.11 b/g/n
Windows 8.1 with Bing

Paired with a usb hub and a wmc remote, this looks to me like the best "bang for buck" option for us Windows lovers? Silent, quite fast and easy to configure and use - any particular reason why a nuc, raspberry pi or something else should be preferred to this?

[stammie]

Well I've just got a similar tablet, as a tablet I love it and I guess depending on your needs it would make an ok media player.
I haven't tried it out connected to my TV as I don't have a mini HDMI cable or adapter, but it does run all things XBMC/Kodi great to a degree.
The major drawback I can see with mine and I assume many of these cheap Windows 8.1 tablets is the wifi, it can run 720P and lower bitrate 1080P's just fine from the wifi but ramp up to to anything above 10GB's as a file size for your average movie and it can't cope, I'm pretty sure it would play these files from local storage but not across a network.
I'm really surprised just how good my cheap tablet is but I'm not sure about it being a dedicated player, although its probably better than most Android boxes doing the rounds

[Topken]

Could give a USB ethernet adapter a try with these as well stammie

[Matt Devo]

why not?

- lack of CPU horsepower for demanding skins
- lack of GPU horsepower for deinterlacing, Hi-10p
- lack of direct wired ethernet (not via USB-OTG)
- Win8.1

I have an Asus T100 convertible BayTrail tablet exactly as you described, and it's nowhere near as competent for media center duties as my (Haswell-based) ChromeBoxes. Not to mention the hassle of connecting/disconnecting any time I want to watch something on TV.

[wizziwig]

why not?

- lack of CPU horsepower for demanding skins
- lack of GPU horsepower for deinterlacing, Hi-10p
- lack of direct wired ethernet (not via USB-OTG)
- Win8.1

I have an Asus T100 convertible BayTrail tablet exactly as you described, and it's nowhere near as competent for media center duties as my (Haswell-based) ChromeBoxes. Not to mention the hassle of connecting/disconnecting any time I want to watch something on TV.

I also have an Asus T100 and Asus Chromebox.

I found that Hi10p actually performed better on my Asus T100 (with z3740). I got zero dropped frames in some very demanding 1080p clips played in Windows/MPC-HC. Using the same software on my Asus Chromebox resulted in ~40 dropped frames during the same anime intro sequence. In OE, the Chromebox got me only ~6 dropped frames which were hard to notice.

I was really surprised how well the quad-core Baytrail handled Hi10p. All 4 cores were maxed out at 100% but no frame drops. Deinterlacing 1080i also worked OK as far as performance but I didn't get a chance to compare image quality.

If you got a USB3 model like the T100, you could always get a USB3->Ethernet adapter and get close to full gigabit speeds. Even a USB2 adapter would probably achieve close to 400 Mbps.

The T100 played frame-packed MVC 3D Blu-Rays in PowerDVD and passed DTS/AC3 over HDMI. It did not support HD audio. Maybe eventually in Linux?

You're also looking at a completely silent solution that uses half the power or less of a Chromebox.

Personally, I still prefer the Chromebox because of better expansion - 4 USB3 ports, real gigabit, more RAM, real SSD, etc. In my case, it was also much cheaper since I got my Chromebox for only $120. I also like having the option to run Linux and an open source BIOS.