Hi! Just read the review for the Nehemiah M1000, and it looks like things are getting close to marketable! I'm looking for a DVD player with CDRW and a 20-40GB hard drive, featuring menu capabilities on my TV and the ability to recognize my existing (IR) remote control (play, pause, stop, previous, next). That Hush case looks nice, but I didn't see any mention of remote control. I see it's easy to hook up an IR sensor, now can anybody show me how to convert the IR signals from my remote to instructions for the PC, assuning I load it with Win98 or XP?

I just want a good MP3 jukebox really, with CDRW capabilities, that looks good and performs conveniently in the living room. Am I to presume from the review that the audio on the Nehemiah is any poorer than the audio built in to my Dell I8100?

Thanks, Gary

I have a Pentium 4 2.53GHz and when I play a DivX file my CPU usage is about 60-80%. Also when I use some of Winamp's visualizations my CPU usage is 90-100%. Something wrong here?

When I just play an MP3, however, my CPU usage is 0-3%, which looks right.

Too bad it's not enough for encoding, when it will be I will buy with a DVD materizer
and a video-in board for TV-recording...... bye bye VHS!

Heh. It looks like you took it easy on the poor little C3 chip and didnt' run processor benchmarks. Just out of curiousity, how well does it fold proteins?

Although the mini-ITX form factor is impressive, I'd rather have a P4 or AthlonXP in micro-ATX form.

A couple of things to note:
1. The hardware mpeg2 decoder only seems to be used by PowerDVD - VIA havent (AFAIK) released any DirectShow filters for use with other media players that take advantage of the hardware decoder...
2. VIA refuse to release the documentation or drivers to allow the hardware MPEG2 decoder to be used under linux (and have been pretty tight when it comes to accelerated graphics drivers/doco for anything other than X) and currently look like they never intend to - so you might want to look elsewhere if you want to build a linux based HTPC using this board.

(see the discussions and unhappy people on the VIA Arena Forums http://forums.viaarena.com)

3. It seems to be a real shortcoming that the TV codec cannot generate any resolutions suitable for widescreen TVs but no-one seems to make much comment about this in any review that I have seen, particularly when the board is targetted at HTPC use.

Whoa, wait....

Just 17cm^2

You mean 17cm x 17cm.... that's 289cm^2. :) I suggest the article reflects this properly.

Sounds like it could fit the bill in very specific places. Yet I don't want to invest time anymore in hardware that fits one function. Future buys for graphics for example will focus on it's capture abilities and PVR functions, as well as future capability. I really don't want to be screwing with client's crap every year, I want to stretch stuff out to 4 or more years, and this doesn't fit that need. I know 4 months down the line this thing will be sitting idle as a machine that costs just a little bit more can do A LOT more. SO my time is drained. Good to see a company nipping at BOTH AMD and INTEL, however insignificant a share they'll make.

These HAVE to have Open SOurce drivers and capability OOB, they really are for the low-end segment i.e. the cheap-o market.

Also, over the weekend I really noticed the linux marketing ramping up. Both Fry's and Walmart have their main ads featuring cheap-ass linux boxes, not XP boxes. Say what you will, that must be pulling in them some cash if they are doing that nationally.

The only thing I really care about for something like this wasn't answered in the review:

Does it boot OpenBSD 3.3?

You mentioned it should have sata. Honestly I think it would be a bad move considering the low availability of the drives and the high price that goes along with it. It seems that anyone buying one of these little duds is watching their wallet. If one is watching their wallet I don't see them shelling out the the same price for a HD as they did for the entire system and only getting 36 gigs at that.

Requiem for a Dream EDITED version?

Booooooo

wow, 2 sentences about the picture on a 20in TV. That's what I call indepth. And normal TV text was fuzzy on my old 23in TV from the couch so the Desktop text on a 20in TV doesn't really say much to me. And I guess I'll just have to assume that getting the TV-out to work is easy to do or if it takes a lot of tweaking. Perhaps the board even boots up with the TV-out active. Glad muyuubyou linked to mini-itx.com where I could get those important questions answered.

I think one of the most important purposes of this board was left untested. It was created to be a media center PC. So how come the TV-out was never test? Especially since iwe're told it'll play any video file with no problems. Nobody buys one of these as a media machine and then hooks up to a (at best 22in) monitor. How's this thing look on a 36in TV?

These things are the future, boys. Joe sixpack will be snarfing these up. These would be very marketable as a cheap lindows/wal-mart special. The market for 600 buck (hell even 200) cpu's and 100 os's will shrink down to the relatively few tech-geeks that frequent these pages. Remember how popular candy colored plastic was to a certain model of computer? Don't think the market shift to small, cheap and fast-enough won't affect the hi-po stuff. The only thing that would push the masses to do otherwise would be some sort of hardware intensive porn delivery/rendering.

#21

Subjective I guess, but I can hear a serious difference using WMP8/9 w/SRS over stock Winamp3. One of the reasons my friends and I traded up soundquality over (alot of) CPU usage ;)

Guess it depends on your sound setup, I'm using a Creative Inspire 5700 5.1 system over SPDif.

On a Dell Inspiron 8100 1ghz Tualatin P3 w/256 megs of ram, I'm using ~35% CPU listening to MP3s over a network drive (I think the NIC has alot to blame here heh).

edit: heh ok in fear of the anti-MS frothing-at-the-mouth crowd, I'm not gonna bother arguing this any further. Case in point, though, is that WMP is a better benchmark of CPU usage over WinAmp, regardless of your preference :P

Diss,

I liked the CPU utilization graphs.. but in the future, I'd suggest using WMP instead of WinAmp, as its a bit more CPU intensive (SRS effects and such), and the sound quality is much better :)