Koolu Media Director??

[mohansen]

Has anyone tried this?  Curious if the video card is supported in LinuxMCE.  The price is attractive.
http://www.koolu.com/

[Stingly]

The price is REALLY attractive! I wonder if they ship to the UK?

[Stingly]

Just fired an email off to them asking about graphics etc. The FAQ on the site says that they do ship to the UK for 96 Canadian dollars (about £47), which when added to the price of the Thin Client (~£97.50) means the whole thing would cost less than £150! I've suggested that if it works with LMCE, they should market it to this community!

[gazlang]

However, it does say in the FAQ's:

Q. Does the Koolu net appliance have a wireless antenna and capability?

A. The Appliance has wireless capabilities but currently can not boot wirelessly...

Not good for a network boot media director

[atreidae]

I dont think i have seen anything yet that can PXE boot over wireless, the wireless card itself would need to know the network to connect to and assosicate before the bios passes init 13 to it..

[totallymaxed]

Has anyone tried this?  Curious if the video card is supported in LinuxMCE.  The price is attractive.
http://www.koolu.com/

Hi there,

Coincidently we are looking at another Geode based machine and the big problem is that the processor (500Mhz) is really too slow for reasonable performance when playing video (and also possibly sluggish performance even in the Orbiter) and the graphics capability looks to be only VESA. So really these machines might just about be ok when running the Orbiter... but thats about it.

Fore decent video performance in a fanless/low energy design you currently really need to look at the Via C7/CN700/CX700 with the processor clocked at 1Ghz or above (the C7/CN700 combo typically gives power footprint of about 12-14W under video playback load). An alternative is the C3/CLE266 based Via boards they are less expensive and less powerful though.

Andrew

[Stingly]

I think you're right Andrew - this is the reply I just got back from Koolu:

The Koolu unit is able to output up to 1920x1440 as an analog VGA signal. For video and performance purposes, we recommend the video be 720x480 and in MPEG-4 format.

With respect to supporting the menus, it should support them with alpha blending provided two things:
1. The colour mode used is 32-bit
2. The menus do not require any 3-D acceleration (the AMD Geode only has 2-D acceleration)

As such, the menu will work, but performance may not be as quick (ie: changing menus) as on a regular desktop.

[totallymaxed]

I think you're right Andrew - this is the reply I just got back from Koolu:

The Koolu unit is able to output up to 1920x1440 as an analog VGA signal. For video and performance purposes, we recommend the video be 720x480 and in MPEG-4 format.

With respect to supporting the menus, it should support them with alpha blending provided two things:
1. The colour mode used is 32-bit
2. The menus do not require any 3-D acceleration (the AMD Geode only has 2-D acceleration)

As such, the menu will work, but performance may not be as quick (ie: changing menus) as on a regular desktop.

I spoke with one of the Pluto devs about the Geode and they confirmed that it would almost certainly work ok as its X86 based. But the processor is just too underpowered and graphics don't have enough acceleration to balance that. So I dont think it will prove to be a good platform for MD's at the moment.