2003-02-27 17:08:23.900994+00 by Dan Lyke 5 comments
Last night I looked around at our CD collection and realized that it's time to put an Ogg Vorbis player in the house. Maybe two. So I ordered a stripped down Via Eden box from iDot, and while I was there noticed that they had a $1500 3 lb Tablet PC with 4 hour battery life. Scoble showed me the NEC Tablet PC which was gorgeous, only 2 lbs, but fairly expensive and with less battery.
[ related topics: Music Weblogs Embedded Devices - Via Eden ]
comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):
#Comment made: 2003-02-27 18:32:15.174033+00 by: Dan Lyke
Oh yeah, I should also mention that the thread on digital music and wanting a physical CD over at Utopia With Cheese helped the "we need an Ogg Vorbis![[Wiki]](/adbanners/lookingglass.png){kind=small}
player" decision.
#Comment made: 2003-02-28 18:10:36.497057+00 by: Mark A. Hershberger
Don't the VIA CPUs have poor floating point support? That seemed to be the case when I had a "500Mhz" VIA CPU.
#Comment made: 2003-02-28 18:19:49.84951+00 by: Dan Lyke
I need to do some benchmarking once I get that machine at home, but floating point on this Transmeta that runs my laptop isn't screaming, so I'm not expecting much.
#Comment made: 2003-02-28 21:44:08.19369+00 by: Mark A. Hershberger [edit history]
I imagine part of the slowness I saw was the result of all the multi-tasking on the box. Without running X and other things, I could see it being fast-enough. And it does have TV-out -- can you pull a TV signal in as well?
#Comment made: 2003-02-28 22:26:09.38624+00 by: Dan Lyke
Not on any of the boards I've found cheaply, although if you're ordering enough of them from Via the connections are there on the motherboard and the chipset. From browsing message boards and searching, I think if you're planning on using this as a video box you'll need to be doing hardware MPEG decoding and using one of the faster than 500MHz boards, and you'll probably want to find a PCI encoder and plug it in there.