Boxee drops tegra 2?
#1
Boxee box will ship with intel and not Nvidia Tegra 2.

This is certainly an interesting development as far I am concerned.
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#2
I had all but written off the boxee box as an option based on all the dancing that was being done around weather or not it would be able to support 1080p video.

This change obviously puts the boxee box back into play for a lot of consumers.

Additionally, now that boxee is running on the same platform as googletv, I think the probability that we will see some form of xbmc running on the googletv hardware just rose dramatically.
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#3
Hmmm still not convinced on the Boxee boxes looks.....
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#4
Good news, a small price to pay even if it drove the price up a little bit.

Anandtech has posted a preview of the Intel CE4100 powered Boxee Box.
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#5
It's available for pre-order on amazon now, priced at $199

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0038JE07O
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#6
I wouldn't care what it has as long as it plays 1080p fine. Where I think they have made a really bad decision is in its design, while it looks nice, where should I put that? Most people have a cabinet (?) where all it AV equipment goes, does it fit there? a more normal shape would have been better..
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#7
PatrickVogeli Wrote:I wouldn't care what it has as long as it plays 1080p fine. Where I think they have made a really bad decision is in its design, while it looks nice, where should I put that? Most people have a cabinet (?) where all it AV equipment goes, does it fit there? a more normal shape would have been better..

I thought that too, until I saw one in person. The thing is tiny. It'll fit anywhere...
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#8
just a headup
Pre-order a Boxee Box Now @ Amazon $199, FS
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#9
I actually looking forward to running XBMC the most on my Boxee Box. Smile
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#10
Makes sense. Nvidia Tegra 2 has seemed disappointing from the get go. You put out a box that does less than ION and its dead in the water....

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#11
With 1080p hardware support for pretty much everything Ion did, I wouldn't say it did less. Internally it probably used a lot of the same decoder hardware, and the A9 was performance wise pretty similar to the Atom (and probably faster then a lot of the single processor Atom boxes people have). I think the real problem is that hardware accelerated flash for linux wasn't going to be ready, which would have killed it (boxee is all about shoving a 100 different flash video streams down your throat).
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#12
From what I understood the Tegra is more like a Sigma or Broadcom design- works perfectly with material encoding within normal Blu Ray specs, but falls apart with oddly encoded scene files.

Part of the reason I love my ION box (over my AppleTV + Broadcom or my PCH) is that it plays EVERYTHING I throw at it, including terribly encoded scene stuff. So much good HD material is only available through the scene (aka for older stuff that is not on Blu Ray yet but does play in HD on Showtime), and so much of that stuff is poorly encoded. With ION, I don't care.

As far as the flash thing goes, does this mean that the Intel chip will do the decoding? I was hoping the Boxee folks would help push forward a GPU accelerated Flash for Linux.

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#13
poofyhairguy Wrote:From what I understood the Tegra is more like a Sigma or Broadcom design- works perfectly with material encoding within normal Blu Ray specs, but falls apart with oddly encoded scene files.

Yeah sorry missed that. I didn't realize Nvidia had screwed up something on the built in H.264 decoder.


poofyhairguy Wrote:As far as the flash thing goes, does this mean that the Intel chip will do the decoding? I was hoping the Boxee folks would help push forward a GPU accelerated Flash for Linux.

Boxee on my Ion system can't play 480p youtube streams without some dropped frames, so they'll have to have some hardware acceleration, probably both for H.264 decode and for alpha blending and colorspace conversion as well.

FWIW flash on some linux systems is hardware accelerated. Android for instance does almost everything in hardware using whatever DSPs are available. Theres just no general cross-distro way to do it. Probably whatever Boxee was going to do wouldn't have worked on normal linux systems.
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#14
Forget about GPU doing video decoding on these type of platforms, there is a dedicated video decoder present on the chipset.
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#15
I'm getting one of these. I was worried about the Tegra 2 but I'm for sure getting it now. I would think especially now that it's not arm based and boxee understanding people want some openness running xbmc won't be too far down the pipeline. Well that's my "hope" at least.
Boxee supports xbmc. So I gotta support boxee and put my money where my mouth is.
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Boxee drops tegra 2?0