I was mostly trying to get a first hand account of how it performs from seasoned anandtech posters. I read the review before I posted; it was a little thin on video performance details.
I was mostly trying to get a first hand account of how it performs from seasoned anandtech posters. I read the review before I posted; it was a little thin on video performance details.
Considering people use Raspberry Pi as front ends, this unit seems ideal. I'd imagine you can load OpenELEC onto it with one of the Intel builds and it'd be solid.
Considering people use Raspberry Pi as front ends, this unit seems ideal. I'd imagine you can load OpenELEC onto it with one of the Intel builds and it'd be solid.
Now I'm considering it instead of a Raspberry as it has enough storage and a bit more horsepower than Raspberry so it should provide a smooth experience.
I'd be interested to know how this turns out. I'm using a RaspPi with OpenELEC in the bedroom and I've been satisfied with everything but I've been looking for something with a little more power to make browsing more smooth before I replace my WDTV Live Hub with an XBMC station.
There are some forums that have talked this point out, and it seems to be mostly positive.
This thing, at least to me, is an Intel NUC with disk and memory included. And while it is only 16GB of disk, that's still plenty of something like OpenElec or a small linux distro. Heck, I'd imagine Windows 7/8 Embedded would work too.
I don't even need/want the internal storage, I'd just boot to XBMC from a flash drive or SD card.
I don't think anyone buys a Chromebox to use it as a HTPC, at least not out of the box. Chrome OS is a web browser, which is fine if your idea of a HTPC is playing Youtube vids (that is covered in the review). The Chromecast is the out of the box HPTC-replacement offering from Google.
But it is trivial to use the Chromebox hardware for a HTPC. I mean, the Intel HD GPU it has is well known. Throw XBMCbuntu on that bad boy and it is as good as any NUC I have (which in my opinion means the best set top box you can buy for local playback).
It has a decent amount of value in that sphere if you don't want to deal with putting together a NUC barebones.
Nope. Lots of people buy em. It's cheaper than buying a NUC barebones.
Purchasing a ChromeBox, then installing OpenELEC or XBMCbuntu is quite popular on HTPC forums.
Exactly why I said "out of the box," IE with Chrome OS. I even go on to talk about how it can provide good value for the hardware in what you quoted.
I feel like you are implying I am giving bad advice and I don't think that is fair. My title on the XBMC Forum is "Resident Hardware Guru" and I have used XBMC on every major platform. I average making a new XBMC HTPC even six months and I try to keep up on all XBMC hardware developments.
FireTV did have a long thread on this forum just not in this subsection:
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2376419
Personally I never mention it because I don't like XBMC HTPCs based on second-citizen platforms. With a decent x86 NUC you get better interface performance than any other small box option (like a FireTV, Pi, jail-broken AppleTV, etc.) with the ability to have the highest possible pluggin compatibility. I can't speak for why it is otherwise not mentioned on this sub-forum.
I agree with you that overall if you want a more varied set of opinions it would be better to ask the question on a more focused forum, but I do feel that many of the people here can at least express a helpful opinion if you don't even know where to start.