Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler HTPC

saw this usb s-card on onkyo thread

http://www.audiophileproducts.com/fireye2

Old thread resuscitation.

Somehow, I did manage to get my analog audio problem solved and am using Banshee. It's fine. Honestly, I don't listen to as much music on this system as I used to. It's been a while since I poked at this, so I don't know exactly what magic sudo thing I did to fix it.

New problem/question:

Having become disillusioned with Netflix after the price increase, I was looking for other vendors. I somehow hit upon Zediva and tried to stream a movie on the subject box (Zotac HD-ID11, Ion 2, dual-core 1.66GHz Atom, Ubuntu). I have Comcast 20Mbps internet service.

The video quality was just awful.

I looked at their FAQ, and they DO seem to recommend a 2.0GHz dual-core, but that just seems unreasonable to me for video streaming. I mean, Netflix is just lovely through either this machine, or the Wii or the XBox. So, I just don't "believe" that you really need that much CPU horsepower to stream video.

What say you?

If you look around at the reviews for Zediva most people comment that the quality is not very good. I don't think it's the CPU, as the decoding should be done by the video card, and that Ion 2 chipset can do full screen, H.264, 1080p without a problem.

Thanks, Chris. That's what I thought.

I've been chasing my tail on the NVidia hardware drivers for about a week thinking that something was amiss. I get "This driver is activated but not currently in use" message. Everything *seems* to "work" (except the Zediva video quality), but that message really bothers me. I can't seem to get it fixed, despite hours of analysis and efforts. It *might* be just a Jockey display problem rather than an actual driver problem.

Anyway, it does seem to be a problem with the ZBox, as we just watched "True Grit" via the Macbook Pro with much improved and entirely acceptable video quality.

Harumph.

I don't watch a ton of Netflix via streaming but I thought their newer "HD" encodes were acceptable... considering they were being streamed on the internet. I still don't watch many movies on it because of audio limitations. Wish they'd get more TV shows but I know the content wars are in full effect right now.

This is all on my i3-2100T.