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Comment by krschultz | Hacker News Reader

Does the 1.2 ghz VIA Nano have enough "oomph" to decompress streaming video? With an HDMI port and at <$300 I can see one of these in my living room with my TV plugged into it for watching Hulu. With cable/satellite >$50 a month you'd pay it off pretty quick if you dropped paying for TV and stuck with Netflix and Hulu.

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Media playback is offloaded to a "VX855 Media System Processor" which handles 1080p video.

I hope it has good Linux support.

You'd have to install a Windows on it to get the Flash hardware acceleration then, I'd assume.

Upon further research, it appears that it will be unable to stream Netflix (which actually uses Silverlight) or Hulu at full 1080p. It is possible to watch some files that are encoded in the proper formats, but streaming seems to be out of the question even on Windows (and I'd much rather have Linux on this).

I don't think it supports hulu, but the roku is much cheaper and is designed to stream netflix..

Yea, but you can stream Netflix on an Xbox 360 so I'm really looking for a way to stream Hulu which Boxee and Roku can't. There are some other things that a full PC is more useful for than a Roku, but if I didn't have an xbox and was looking for the cheapest way to get some streaming to my TV the roku is the way to go.

FWIW you can get a Asus Aspire Revo for $199 which seems to be able to do this. I bought one but haven't hooked it up yet.

I have a Revo and it's pretty nice for streaming video from a server but it's pretty sluggish for Flash content even with the newest Flash beta running under windows.

I love it as a XBMC front-end to my UPNP linux server; it is super quiet and uses very little energy when it's sleeping, and works fine on HD content. As far as Hulu goes though, it just doesn't cut it (YMMV, I didn't try very hard).

What are you running on it? Is it an Ion-based machine (are all of them?)

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