Apple TV vs Aspire Revo

[Marvin]

I've mentioned this before but I think this is what we'll be seeing in a long overdue Apple TV hardware refresh:

http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/28/acer-aspirerevo-review/

1.6GHz Atom 230 processor
2GB Ram
250GB HDD
Nvidia 9400M 256MB

$299

vs

1.0GHz Pentium-M
256MB Ram
160GB HDD
Nvidia Go 7300 64MB

$329

Even going for the $229 ATV and upgrading the drive yourself, the hardware is still behind and the Revo is running a full OS and looks a lot smaller. It should run much cooler too.

Given that the 9400M is capable of playing Bioshock, Half Life 2, Burnout Paradise etc this hardware setup would be a great home media center and cover gaming very well. The CPU could do with a bump to dual core though.

Side by side, I'd buy the Revo over the current ATV at that price and simply use the Revo as a media center. At least you can use a web browser and play decent games as well as support a whole load more media formats and it has HDMI out, same as the ATV so would hook up just as easily to a modern TV. Not to mention you would get the ability to use netflix and other services and plug in a DVD Player or maybe even a Blu-Ray drive as well as use the hardware Badaboom encoder for your ipod as mentioned on the above site. It can even be setup for PVR.

I reckon Apple will have to overhaul the ATV pretty soon as the Revo gives people so much more value for money. Thing is, they'll probably still limit it to being a media device only so the full PC Revo will still do more out of the box but it would still be a huge improvement to just match the hardware spec on offer. I mean really, a 40GB hard drive in a $229 media box is ridiculous.

I would hope they either drop the price to $149 and maintain lower hardware specs or make a machine that comes close to the Revo spec for $299, maybe with some online gaming distribution.

[guinness]

I like the Revo a lot so far, but the problem is that unless SW is written to handle it's 9400M, the Atom will bog down on even Hulu vids at full-screen.

I may or may not get one for my HDTV, but will probably wait for Win7 or see how Ubuntu runs on it first.

Engadget did a nice write of it.
http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/28/acer-aspirerevo-review/

And I found another review, where they actually show the interior of it (nice and easy to get at the internals):
http://hothardware.com/Articles/Acer-Aspire-Revo-SFF-NVIDIA-Ion-PC/?page=3

And at full load, it consumes less than 30 W. Just needs some CUDA-enabled Flash support and/or a dual-core Atom.

I never saw the point in the ATV, as to me, it's just an iPod for my TV, and I've thought that digital rentals are just stupid, not to mention iTunes only formats just limits it.

[squal]

It does run nicely on Windows 7. The new Revo 3100 (which is cheaper too) is a daul core Atom 330.

Here's a post (http://www.brechen.com/blog/2009/12/xbmc-on-windows-7-using-mpc-hc-as-external-player-on-aspire-revo-3610/) on how to make it work with XBMC. Mostly it will launch Media Player Classiv HC to do the playback.

You do need coreavc codec (http://coreavc.com/), although there's some people who are using other stuff.

Hope this helps.

[Marvin]

It's an old thread but another ATV alternative is the WD TV box:

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=735

The new model connects to a network and streams from a computer directly. You can also plug in a hard drive with the movies and play them from there.