Hi,
I thought that some others might be interested in our trials using an ASUS Eee Box 1006 platform for a signage player. I bought a few last year from Amazon.com for $280. I was attracted to this platform for a few reasons:
1) HDMI output (most of the lower cost Eee Box only output on VGA)
2) HDMI sound channel (not always supported on HDMI video link from PC)
3) ATI Radeon GPU acceleration (should work with Flash10 deployment)
4) Built in WiFi 802.11n
5) Size (fits behind the screen and includes a mounting bracket)
6) Price (lowest cost I could find with HDMI output and with HDD)
It happens to run WinXP. They don't sell a Linux version. Perhaps there is a GPU drivers issues.
* Beware if you want to run full frame 1080P video! * This box would only work in this circumstance if
your video was encoded such that the GPU h/w would be used (H.264?). And likely only in
720P, rather than 1080P. For most of our simple animation, it seems to work fine.
We are avoiding support for full frame HD video since we don't want to look like a TV channel.
One of the units we received acted strangely upon boot up; once in a while it would go to
a windows recovery mode. Seems to be fine now with the BIOS update fix (Dec. 2009).
It comes with a nice wireless mouse and wireless keyboard. Overall, I'm quite happy so far.
They have been running pretty much continously since December.
I haven't tried the mediabox from mediasignage so unfortunately I can't do a proper comparision.
By the sounds of it, it is a much more capable box. But I think as the ATOM platform matures
and increases in performance, it will be nice to have a low power and low cost option.
I haven't grappled with the prospects of having to manage 1000 controllers based on a consumer
platform. I'm sure that at some point, switching to a commercial platform would make sense.
ATOM is evolving quickly right now so I'd rather stay on the consumer track right now.
/Mike
