Hacker News Reader

Comment by w1ntermute | Hacker News Reader

> Currently, for most devices only software decode of audio and video is hooked up.

This is a good start, but ultimately, you need hardware decoding. Even if a modern phone or tablet could decode 720p x264 in real time (many cannot), the battery usage would make it entirely untenable.

View on HN

Yes, but you could put your tablet on a charger and hook it to the TV. If you then had a remote control app on your phone, that would be perfect. Even better, someone designs a snazzy dock for this function, which may or may not have its own purpose-built remote/controller.

Voila, your tablet is now also a media center box. (And could even function as a low-power game box.)

Or get a Gen 1 or Gen 2 AppleTV, both of which are (very) easily rootable and can run XMBC smoothly and cost less than half the price of the Android tablets I've seen.

There is no 1080p support on AppleTV before v3 (which isn't jailbroken yet) - a major deal-breaker for me, for a home media player.

But what about the AK802 Android 4.0 micro-pc network player with 1.5ghz Cortex A8, 1GB RAM, 4GB flash, HDMI for less than $70 ? Its the size of s thumb drive, so you could make a keychain out of it. XBMC for Android should make this playable out of the box (no root necessary).

Pretty cool.

Is there a list of devices that currently have hardware decoding supported?

I think all dual core phones and up support 720p decoding pretty well.

The article talks about the Pivos box already, it's supposed to be (check first!) this one:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0088IGPM8

Not affiliated, no experience with that thing, but I think that's the only device with hardware decoding support as stated by the article.

Practically any device (eg, $60 Deal Extreme set top boxes) has some hardware decoding these days (H264 decoding at least). Whether it is used by XMBC is another matter.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com