The Boxee Box: too free to live?

Posted Oct 22, 2012 19:00 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313)
In reply to: The Boxee Box: too free to live? by dashesy
Parent article: The Boxee Box: too free to live?

Beagleboard $150

600MHz Cortex A8 chip
128M ram
256M flash
SD card

Raspberry Pi $35

700-1000MHz ARM6 chip
512M ram (new version, old one was 256M)
SD card storage

are you sure the beagleboard is 'much more powerful' than the pi?

it's possible that the video acceleration of the beagleboard is better than the pi. I don't know a good way to look that up.

The Boxee Box: too free to live?

Posted Oct 22, 2012 19:30 UTC (Mon) by dashesy (guest, #74652) [Link] (1 responses)

Maybe the additional DSP+GPU may help:
TMS320C64x+ DSP for accelerated video and audio decoding, and an Imagination Technologies PowerVR SGX530 GPU. It also says (520 MHz up to 720p @30 fps) for DSP but then a combination of CPU+DSP maybe able to handle higher resolutions.

The Boxee Box: too free to live?

Posted Oct 22, 2012 20:26 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

The GPU on the pi is able to drive a 1080p@60hz display. You can play video at this resolution if you are using the hardware codec support.

Unfortunantly this does require a binary blob driver loaded by the boot process to work, but while this isn't good, it's no worse than anything else in the space.

The Boxee Box: too free to live?

Posted Oct 22, 2012 20:06 UTC (Mon) by GhePeU (subscriber, #56133) [Link]

IIRC the original BeagleBoard can't even drive a monitor at that resolution. There's a newer Beagleboard version, the BeagleBoard XM (149 USD):

1 GHz Cortex A8
512 MB LP-DDR
microSD card storage
C64x+ DSP

And it still doesn't support 1080p video, at best it can do 720p.

A Pandaboard ES can play 1080p video (I've got one on my desktop now), but it costs ~180USD. It's a wholly different board, however, dual-core Cortex A9 1.2GHz with 1 GB LP-DDR2, 802.11 b/g/n, 10/100 Ethernet, Bluetooth v2.1 EDR, HDMI, DVI-D... it's also very well supported for now, the latest drivers release supports Wayland (!).

The Odroid-X is another alternative, it costs about 50 USD less than a Pandaboard (no WiFi or Bluetooth however) and has a quad-core Exynos4412 Cortex A9 1.4 GHz, but I don't think HD video acceleration is working on Linux at the moment.