[Scott R]

In case you haven't heard, it looks like the Revo may have some new competition from Dell. Available today for ordering/configuring direct from Dell is their new Zino PC. It looks to be sized similarly to the Mac Mini, and includes an optical drive. This is not an Atom/ION platform. Instead, it uses an AMD chip as the CPU and ATI graphics. I'm most interested in keeping things cheap, and here's what the cheapest Dell Zino config can get you compared to the cheapest Acer AspireRevo...

Revo 1600
- $199
- Single-core Atom 1.6GHz CPU
- NVIDIA ION graphics chip
- 1GB of RAM
- 160GB hard drive (5400RPM?)
- Windows XP

Dell Zino
- $229
- AMD Athlon™ 2650e (512K L2, 1.6GHz)
- Integrated ATI Radeon HD3200 Graphics
- 2GB of RAM
- 250GB 7200RPM hard drive
- Windows 7 Home Premium
- 8X DVD+/-RW Drive

You can configure it to add a faster CPU, more RAM, a bigger hard drive, a Blu-ray drive, and even a different graphics card. But, of course, those things can increase the cost significantly.

IMO, they really dropped the ball by not including a built-in IR receiver (as far as I can tell).

Now, for the money, this appears to offer more bang-for-the-buck than the Revo. It has an optical drive, a bigger (and possibly faster) hard drive, twice the RAM, and Windows 7.

But is the Zino's CPU/GPU up-to-snuff for 1080p content? And can it pass 5.1 audio over HDMI? I don't know the answers to this, but I'm hoping someone here does.

[miljbee]

I have a 780G Plateform (AMD 4850e + Radeon HD 3200)

This platform cannot handle "true" 1080p content, I mean a video with a 40Mbit/s bit rate ...

But it plays almost any 720p content fine.

If you are looking for a small cheap platform, I think you should go to ION + Linux.

There is now some really cheap platforms. In france, we have the fiono 330 :
ATOM 330 + ION + CASE (really small) + PSU + Wifi = 179€, put in it a good old hard drive, 2GB of ram, and i think you will have the perfect HTPC ... but you will need linux + XBMC ...

[johoja]

I have a 780G Plateform (AMD 4850e + Radeon HD 3200)

This platform cannot handle "true" 1080p content, I mean a video with a 40Mbit/s bit rate ...

But it plays almost any 720p content fine.

If you are looking for a small cheap platform, I think you should go to ION + Linux.

There is now some really cheap platforms. In france, we have the fiono 330 :
ATOM 330 + ION + CASE (really small) + PSU + Wifi = 179€, put in it a good old hard drive, 2GB of ram, and i think you will have the perfect HTPC ... but you will need linux + XBMC ...

What makes you think that platform can't handle 1080p? AMD GPU's do allow offloading which would make it similar to NVIDIA's offering.

The difference lies in that xbmc currently doesn't do DXVA which is needed to offload in windows, and AMD GPU's use VA-API in Linux to do offloading, which again is not in xbmc and very buggy in mplayer.

If your using MPC-HC as an external player though I don't see why that platform couldn't handle it. (As long as it has UVD 1/2) it should give you the same performance as an ION based system both would be hw accelerated via DXVA.

[Scott R]

Just to clarify...I already own the single-core ($200) Revo. Two of them, actually. And I'm quite happy with them. I started a thread over at the AVS Forums about the Revos running XBMC here:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1185529

My goal with that thread, aside from logging my daily adventure as I tried to get everything up and running, was to direct people who were thinking about buying a Popcorn Hour or WDTV Live over to the idea of using this ultra-cheap $200 Revo as an alternative to those devices. The Dell Zino at $230 is close enough to that price that it could make another good choice, but only if it can handle 1080p/5.1 content as well (or better) than the Revos.

FWIW, I'm currently using XBMC for Windows and launching MPC-HC as an external player.

Mods: I just realized that I should not have posted this in the XBMC for Windows forum, as this topic is not really Windows specific. Please move this to a more general forum if you don't mind.

[jhsrennie]

I have a 780G Plateform (AMD 4850e + Radeon HD 3200)

This platform cannot handle "true" 1080p content, I mean a video with a 40Mbit/s bit rate ...

Any idea if the 1.8GHz CPU or the x2 CPUs will play 1080p? I have a Revo (1.6GHz Atom 230) and while it's a nice enough box it's inability to cope with 1080p is an irritant and I'd hoped the Zino would be better. I assume that given there's no hardware support in Windows XBMC it's the CPU rather than the video chip that's the bottleneck.

Thanks,

JR

PS I've noticed that your CPU is the AMD 4850e. Isn't that 2.5GHz? Can you really not play 1080p on a processor that fast? A Mac Mini will do it.

[Scott R]

Any idea if the 1.8GHz CPU or the x2 CPUs will play 1080p? I have a Revo (1.6GHz Atom 230) and while it's a nice enough box it's inability to cope with 1080p is an irritant and I'd hoped the Zino would be better.

You should be able to play back 1080p with your Revo. With XBMC Live/Linux you may need to upgrade to 2GB of RAM. With XBMC for Windows you can do it with just 1GB of RAM, but you need to launch MPC-HC as an external player. The latter is what I'm doing.

[CrashX]

ScottR:

Have you tried using unofficial xbmc DSPlayer builds to play 1080p content ?

[Scott R]

No, I've been using MPC-HC. I just saw the threads about DSPlayer, but I'm still unclear as to whether that will run within XBMC or as an external player (like MPC-HC). If the latter, what would be the advantage of using DSPlayer instead of MPC-HC?

[CrashX]

It works similar somewhat to how VDPAU works in Linux. In this case, instead of using software we are using Direct Show ( Hardware Assistanted ) to display the movie.

[dtviewer]

It works similar somewhat to how VDPAU works in Linux. In this case, instead of using software we are using Direct Show ( Hardware Assistanted ) to display the movie.

I think what Scott was asking, and I would like to know myself is if you use DsPlayer does it work like using MPC-HC with XBMC for windows.

In other words, does Dsplayer open as an external player everytime it is used, like MPC-HC does, or is it built-in to XBMC.

[ashlar]

Is is built-in. Exactly like DVDplayer. Same interface, everything. But it's still in early stages of development.

[CrashX]

It is won't launch an external program ..

[dtviewer]

Is is built-in. Exactly like DVDplayer. Same interface, everything. But it's still in early stages of development.

Thanks. Just the answer I was looking for.

[00011011]

The Dell may have a couple of obvious advantages such as an Optical drive and Faster Hard Drive (which is irrelevant if you are streaming your media), but how do the video playback abilities/quality differ? Which integrated video card is superior?

[joshuass]

What kind of processor is in hte Zino?

For XBMC, the GPU differences between the two are pretty irrelevant, unless you are running XBMC in linux, which then the NVIDIA one has the upper hand with its VDAPU system.

Though, from what I've been reading, some progress has been in the ATI camp for Linux with their own VDAPU-like setup.