Fiire Station 2.2" Review/Specs

[ddamron]

Motherboard:  VIA EPIA-EX
interestingly enough, no HDD
audio out by coax spdif or optical spdif ONLY.. (no audio 1/8" connectors)

will fill more in when I learn more...

Dan

[1audio]

Last I checked the EPIA-EX ( 2 minutes ago) it has L/R RCA connectors for analog audio.

[ddamron]

umm  DUH??  Yeah, it does.. I'm a moron... wasn't looking for rca.. My bad..

This unit works well... few lockups during configuration...

BTW, both stations auto-sense WAY BETTER than my dell Inspiron 9300...

[tschak909]

auto-sense?

-Thom

[ddamron]

auto sense as in did the core find the MD's?  Yeah, really quick... it took about 3 seconds, and SNAP, configuration began...

[tschak909]

oh ok! cool! :-)

-Thom

[extragewy]

Does MythTV work on the station?  Can you watch live tv on the station?

[marrandy]

Apparently, the 2.2" set-top box doesn't do transparent menus.

Anyone want to comment on this ?

[Todd]

the fiire website (http://www.fiire.com/fiire-station.php) advertises all three MD versions as being able to do UI2 with alpha blending.  Is this true?

[tschak909]

it damned well should!

-Thom

[ddamron]

marrandy,

CONFIRMED.  My 2.2 doesn't have transparent menus either.

(The rest of the interface is transparent, just not the menus)

My 1" is also the same... no transparent menus...

weird that the engine DOES have them..

[fiire]

**FIIRE'S RESPONSE**

All the FiireStations, 1" and 2.2" and STB, use the same graphics engine, based on an embedded Via solution.  Neither the standard Via Linux  drivers, nor the OpenChrome drivers support alpha-blending.  Only nVidia does, but nVidia has problems with video tearing.  So, special drivers were developed just for LinuxMCE for the Via engine.  Fiire licenses those drivers.

These drivers do support alpha blending and high-quality video playback.  The alpha blending is done in a non-standard way.  It doesn't use Xorg's composite extensions, and the popup portions of the menu are not alpha blended.  However the menu itself is.  So is the media file browser screen.

The big problem with these licensed drivers is that MythTV doesn't work with it, nor does Kubuntu 0704 or 0710, or the KDE desktop.  So, the FiireEngine ships with a special diskless image for the FiireStations based on Kubuntu 0610 without KDE.  It works fine for media playback, and you can record Myth shows on the FiireEngine, but you cannot run Myth locally.

We're currently trying to get the OpenChrome and/or Via stock Linux drivers to work with the Fiire Stations and Kubuntu 0710.  When we do, FiireStation users will have the choice of using those standard drivers with the latest LinuxMCE, Myth, and KDE, but without alpha blending, or continuing to use the proprietary drivers which we licensed which do alpha blending, but don't run Myth or KDE.

[ddamron]

I would have liked to know that before I purchased 2 of them...

MythTV is a KEY part of my system.  Not being able to use myth with the ADVERTISED UI2 is not good.

Maybe they should ADVERTISE that.

[jca]

Ouch, not good. You should lower people's expectations with alpha blending...

[nite_man]

I would have liked to know that before I purchased 2 of them...
MythTV is a KEY part of my system.  Not being able to use myth with the ADVERTISED UI2 is not good.
Maybe they should ADVERTISE that.

Agree. I though to buy four 1" FireStation and thanks to that forum I didn't do it (but I still need something similar). IMHO Fiire should post all limitations of its hardware on its web site!