Minor correction, at least I think it's a correction: The eHome receivers might not be necessary for using the remote itself, just a component of Media Center. When shooting the Niveus video I spent several hours trying to get Windows Media Center to record over composite instead of RF, and found that it absolutely refuses to even try unless you convince it that you have a set-top box (cable, satellite, etc) and go through a whole IR blaster setup process, and if you don't have the eHome, it will simply refuse to proceed until you connect one. This was so frustrating that I internalized it as "the ehome receiver is mandatory." It's sort of true, in that there *is* a function that won't work without it which you may very well have wanted - but can you use the rest of the remote features with a generic receiver? Maybe, I wouldn't be surprised.
I'm pretty sure very early on there was a tuner requirement to use WMC at all, and this could be related to that. Even though I find no mention of this online (well, wikipedia lol). All PCI(e) tuner cards all came with IR ins for usage with IR hubs (there were others than the eHome, in Europe at least), and to use WMC at all you had to have a tuner and maybe later a set-top box was allowed. I found a forum post from 2009 stating that you did need to hook-up the IR hub to either a tuner or a set-top box to use the remote, so you're definitely not wrong. Potentially this requirement was dropped when WMC allowed everyone to use it. Maybe the remote requirements were dropped way after the tuner requirements as some sort of oversight? edit: i just remembered some part of this is definitely true, because to even use WMC on my PC at all I had to use my xbox as a media extender. otherwise the software refused to boot. I think this is Vista-era? I was also 14 years old so details are a bit muddy
The irony that the ps3 was probably the best off the shelf HTPC. It could play games, bluray, DVD, stream media via the network, play media off a USB drive, had a built in web browser with flash support. Once my family got one, I canned my home made HTPC as it just did everyone so perfectly.
I still refuse to use anything else than a PC. Nothing beats a real browser and a physical keyboard and pointing device. Fuck typing passwords with a controller. And only on a computer is it easy to play all of my legal digital copies of films and shows.
I was/am an Xbox boy, so I'm trying to find a scenario where the 360 beat out the PS3, in this use case. Maybe you were willing to ignore Blu-ray for Media Center and/or Gears/Halo/Forza?
@@professordetective807The Xbox 360 was able to stream Netflix back when they were streaming via Microsoft silverlight, when the PS3 was unable to. If my opinion counts, I much preferred the 360 controller versus the PS3 controller, and xbox 360 had Halo 3.
@@professordetective807 the fact that the 360 could only play videos at a maximum resolution of 720p still annoys me. Never understood why Microsoft kept it that way making it an utterly inferior media player / streaming device.
I am watching this on my E6420 that I have owned since 2011. Didn't know about the USB 3.0 expansion module, so you just caused a sale on ebay right now. You are officially an influencer ... of a bygone era.
The USB 3.0 situation was mostly Intel's fault: until the 3rd gen (Ivy Bridge) they didn't have native USB 3.0 ports on the chipset/PCH. Even the MacBooks only started having 3.0 ports in 2012.
@@olnnn That too, but most computers didn't bother with USB 3.0 until the chipset included because it needed a separate chip (that costed, you know, money) and was probably buggy.
@@olnnn The 2011 Macs were in a interesting spot because of this: no USB 3.0, but they had the then brand-new and shiny Thunderbolt 1 port that could do 10 Gbps, but anything capable cost an arm and a leg. I managed to buy a Thunderbolt to USB 3.0 dongle a few years after.
1:04 _"How dare they ask me to pay money for a well-designed, purpose-built device that does a great job at a specific task that I value highly. What fiends! I'll show them, by spending the same amount of money and vastly more time and effort, making something that works almost half as well."_
"The wifi card won't go bad". My wife's laptop's wifi chip recently went bad so catastrophically and brought down the PCIe bus that windows thought the NVME drive had failed. That was fun to diagnose.
Haha, I've had Wifi cards prevent laptops from powering on they failed so badly. Ofc these are all lemons basically, chips which were ticking time bombs from the moment they left the factory, you just lost the silicon lottery. A well manufactured wifi card *should* just work for decades.
59:46 HDMI only has a single DVI link; DVI's connector also had a dual link mode for higher resolutions. HDMI was almost going to have a double-wide connector (there's even pictures of it somewhere) for dual-link HDMI, but that never shipped. Before HDMI 1.3 you would need dual-link DVI for 1440p. There was an industry push for 1440p at some point but it wound up getting overshadowed by 3D. 3D and 1440p actually had roughly the same bandwidth demands out of the cable but 3D also meant TV manufacturers didn't need to make new, higher-density panels, so that's what they tried to sell you. For 3D, they could just run them at 120hz (which is also why gaming suddenly got good refresh rates again). That being said, if you hadn't shown that this thing also had HDMI I would have just accused it of omitting HDMI to reduce patent licensing costs.
Don't forget the attempt to make 21:9 TVs a thing! The Phillips models I was able to find from that time all had 2560x1080 panels, which would technically qualify for that "higher then 1080p" resolution class... These were actual TVs sold in TV sizes of the time with normal TV IO (well plus a Dual-Link DVI for obv. Reasons) and menus and such. Nobody bought them tho, since there really wasn't any attempt at making a Gen2 model...
Thank you so much for filming in 60 fps. I know it's a huge pain in the ass in terms of storage and processing but it makes the videos sooooo much nicer to watch.
@@CathodeRayDudei appreciate it as well. It's so much better on my MacBook or iPhone, and definitely a lot better on my gaming rig too. You're just the best. Love ya, bruv. ❤
YES!!! i hate watching videos with tearing during movement cause they didn't record at 60FPS! When you have a high refresh rate monitor 60FPS youtube is almost a must. imo.
Likewise. It's so much like the little combo Bluetooth keyboard/trackpad I have, but if they'd thought of it in 2010. Very neat, if poorly implemented.
The thing about watching movies legally is that pirating is easier. DRM is such a bitch that I can stream a movie illegally faster than trying to figure out how to pay for it.
hahaha well I lived through it, and even though it was a blast, it was also incredibly silly the entire time. Nothing ever really worked, and even when it did, the illicitly obtained material we were watching on it was usually of such poor quality that you'd be better off with a VHS tape in every way other than convenience. A lot of PC history is ridiculous, which is why I'm so fascinated with it. Glad you enjoyed!
Amazing work once again!!! The phenomenon of Gravis managing to make an engaging hour plus video about a product so boring that I would not even bother to pick up the box to see what it was is truly a sight to behold. I also appreciate the change in you presentation style. It seems (to me at least) that in a lot of your more recent videos you have been able to take a much calmer and slightly less "hostile" tone while still clearly communicating the shortcomings of the products even while continuing to make the very blunt jokes and observations which made me fall in love with your content in the first place. Always makes my day whenever I see an upload from you. Have an enjoyable holiday season and a pleasant new year!!!!
@@CathodeRayDude I am going to second that person's comment. I also appreciate the new gentler format of scathing remarks. Oh, and your visual gags are still top-notch.
Haha seems like he goes easier on the smaller companies doing weird stuff rather than companies like IBM going off their meds for the Portable. You do see some of the Seething Rage peek through when he discusses CyberLink PowerDVD, as it should because CyberLink is one of those software companies that belongs in the dumpster.
Who remembers the BOXEE box? Walmart bought them to bury them, but it was glorious, the first and last turnkey device of its kind, purpose built to grab metadata and poster art for downloads. So rad.
32:03 reminds me of the first wave of Galaxy Fold review units which had this kind of thing and reviewers where peeling the screen off, immediately wrecking the device
Really wanted to see you stick the usb receiver dongle for that keyboard in another computer, see if it works as a generic HID or if there's some special drivers required...
the biggest problem is likely the charger - it's probably the sort of thing that a tech savvy person with a 3D printer could solve, but for most people, it's basically useless without the built in battery connector.
@@avrilsegoli there's plenty of hacks to make that work without a 3d printer, even; you could rig up something with the corresponding pogo pins (readily available at digikey and elsewhere) and some perfboard to solder them to, and hold the charger on the device with a clamp or a weight. Alternately, drill a hole in the side and stick a DC barrel socket in there instead. I bet it's just 5v USB over those pins, too.
14:30 I don't remember PCs having blu-ray drives ever being that common, even in the 2009-2015 era. From what I remember, most either had a DVD drive, or no drive at all by then.
I bought an expensive Dell XPS in 2012 and it had a BD drive. High end laptop though, I think they tended to include them or at least offer it as an option.
@@justanotheryoutubechannel have only ever seen one pre-builgnwith a Blu-ray drive and it also was an HD-DVD drive made by LG. Other than that they were custom built with the drives.
PowerDVD, like every legitimate way to play UHD DRM protected content (hint hint, it's only that and Netflix), requires Intel SGX. An x86 instruction extension that hasn't been included in Intel CPUs since Alder Lake. You wanna know what they did in v.23 to fix this problem? They've thrown out UHD Blu-Ray support entirely. If you wanna play your UHD Blu-Ray in a legitimate way on a machine that is not a dedicated UHD Blu-Ray player you have to somehow aquire an older version of PowerDVD and an Intel CPU between 7th and 11th gen. Neither of which is being sold anymore... And no, AMD never supported SGX, it was an Intel only thing... In general the whole Streaming thing is kindof infuriating. It's almost like racism against PC users and those who don't wanna upgrade their stuff every few years. Like "Oh? You wanna have more then just Stereo Sound, wanna use HDR or get a video quality better then Standard 1080p UA-cam quality? Don't play on a PC then! Get a Smart TV or Streaming Stick, modern ones at that btw, we don't want AV equipment from 2016!"
meanwhile if you actually want stereo sound you're SOoL surprisingly often: many blurays I've come across just say 'surround sound or go die in a ditch, pesant' ... this is borderline universal with anime, in which case only the English audio will be done that way (complete with audio balancing that leaves you with the option of 'hearing damage from the BGM' or 'dialog so quiet you can't actually make out half the words' if you only have stereo sound), the Japanese audio will be in stereo... and only stereo. Want JP audio in surround sound? nope!
Instead of racism, is more like demonising everything in the name of DRM. Similar to streaming applications not working on rooted phones, or applications not wanting to output video if the screen is not HDCP-compliant. You gotta have their “blessed” devices if you want to be allowed to play with them. It's just that the blessing has a different name each time: signatures, certifications, HDCP, Cinavia, SafetyNet, Play Integrity, SGX, TPM…
@@laurencefraser Oh yeah, I totally get that. Some people might bring the argument that you could just pay to get Dolby Atmos for headphones and get Virtual Surround that way, but I'll be honest, other then providing some special effects, it's not much different from just using stereo speakers... Heck, the mixing on some 5.1/7.1 movies is so reliant on the center channel that you're even SoL on a Quadrophonic setup (basically 5.1 minus the center speaker)...
@@laurencefraser Ever heard of downmixing? Every media player codec worth their salt has options to help you set this up according to your preferences. Or you could set up LAV audio filters for the same purpose.
The gameplay footage is making me hearken back to launching massive ships in Kerbal Space Program on my 2011 Macbook Air (in 2016) and *happily* playing with
You know games on the N64 chug like crazy but I played them happily as a kid not thinking anything was really wrong. Crazy to think Nintendo was putting out games that dropped to single digit frames when anything significant happened on screen, and still expected loads of people to buy it. Perfect Dark had a Hi-Res mode. Why even?
@@cliffordreynolds1835 Because clearly I had a dozen gaming computers to choose from but just chose to play games on a 5+ year old hand-me-down laptop that was solely designed for thinness
@nytpu Hey you have to play the hand you're dealt. I'd rather play on a Mac than nothing at all. I'm just saying it wouldn't be my first choice. Desktops are obviously better, and Windows is better for compatibility as I'm sure you know.
same, I love being able to play most modern games reasonably well at 2560x1600 on my 780M. and in the cases where it's not enough, I'm still happy enough with 1920x1200 (or 1280x800, in rare cases)
Me and my Franken-OptiPlex SFF PC that I've modded with a Xeon CPU and resizable BAR as a weird HTPC because I dislike TV-centric interfaces and walled gardens.
Generic N100 NAS boards are the new way! I have 70TB connected, running Ubuntu LTS, hosting Jellyfin/all the *arr apps/Transmission/Nzbget. I haven't done this in YEARS but the landscape of streaming services made me put my peg leg on. The largest change I found was that for, at least modern & popular media, Usenet is the method of choice for fast and reliable downloads. All that to say that for anyone into HTPCs, the N100 can be had for $100 (or 140-180 for the 6-SATA board) in the MicroITX form factor, has Intel QSV for hardware transcoding, and kicks ass. I aggregated the 4 2.5Gbe NICs. Thing just kicks ass, what a gamechanger. Great video, watched the pre-release and the final. I didn't realize this was even something in the consumer market at any point beyond the high-end devices like the Niveus types.
@@francistheodorecattebro what. bitflips in RAM aren't corrupting data on a hard drive that you're just reading from. The bitflips comes after the read operation. It doesn't re-write the data it reads. Do you know how computers work
You talked about those fools spending hours lying down under the TV trying to fix the Bluetooth driver on a MythTV box, well god is my witness I was that fool and regret nothing. Now I've grown, matured and moved on, I do it with my TrueNAS.
I do have fond memories of an ION computer. I bought a ZOTAC mini-ITX motherboard that was ION based. I forget which Atom it had, but something I found funny was that the ION chip had a heatsink with a fan while the Atom only had a heatsink. The entire reason I got the board was it was cheap and I wanted to build a computer for my Grandparents who had horrible luck with pre-built machines. I put the thing together paired with 4GBs of RAM, a GT710 I got from a friend, a DVD drive with no name on it, an ITX Rosewill case, a PSU from an eMachines whose motherboard died, an 80GB Intel SSD I got from another friend, a 500GB Hitachi HDD, and finally Windows 7 Starter. That computer lasted for 5 years without my Grandparents ever having an issue with it. Then I built them a newer one with all new parts since I had a real job at that point. So I actually do have good memories of an ION machine.
This genuinely had me laughing with the silly moments 😂 Also I had some form of an Nvidia and Intel Atom combo in a Zotac Zbox I got at a surplus sale at my highschool. It made for a really mediocre Linux box I recall. It also has the lovely blue ring. Which fun fact! You can disable it in the BIOS if it wasn't your cup of tea. Also no! This is not a "My favorite ion device" comment!!!
1:03:36 imma make someone's day, LED dimming tape. It reduces the brightness from about 50-80% and they come in pre-cutout sections to stick over panels so you can still see the lights but they're not blinding. It's such a game changer for me. At the same time though if they didn't wanna diffuse the light they should've just added an extra resistor or make one beefier to dim the light more.
Elecrical tape works too, I had a really bright always on LED on a power bar that I just stuck about three layers of electrical tape over. Edit: just got to that part of the video, sniped by CRD.
It was actually easier to rip and watch my Blu-rays then it was to play the Blu-ray with the disk in the drive. It worked eventually, but if they want people to play it legally, they should make it easier to play them legally.
@@FudgeXDD It's fairly easy provided you've got a good drive. I got one recommend by the forums and flashed it. Before flashing the firmware, I could rip just about any Blu-ray at about 2.0x speed. After flashing, I could rip them at higher speeds. It also allows me to rip UltraHD Blu-rays. You'll need certain drives for that. MakeMKV normally takes care of the encryption, I've yet to run into one I've been unable to rip. I don't really have experience with how it was when Blu-ray was newer tech, but I can definitely tell you it may be easier to just rip them then to try to play them unless you want to deal with crappy software.
That generation of beloved Dell laptop is still my daily driver at home. It aged out at work and does what I need with Ubuntu, after my cat killed my 2011 MacBook pro with water
18:13 PFFFT.... that disc was, at least for a time, probably worth like 30 bucks or something. might be lower now with the blu-ray release in america finally and it on netflix
£500 vs $499, the £500 will have included tax (unless it was a business purchase) as it's the same everywhere over here, but the $499 will have had the sales tax of whichever state the purchaser was in added on top. Probably? Oh and the PS3 works as a media centre until it detects a Cinavia watermark on your legitimate backups and mutes the audio.
Maybe that accounted for some of it, but remember, in 2011 a pound was, like, $1.60. Computer and electronics in general in the era were notorious for stuff being "priced the same" even though the pound was worth so much more than a dollar.
I feel called out. Back when morrowind came out I was 20 years old, living on my own, anything fun was purchased mostly with money found in between couch cushions (inherited couches from the 70s with truly dreadful fabrics and a permanent cigarette smell) and I played every 3d game at 15-30 fps at minimal settings if I was lucky. Still enjoyed 'em.
In regards of the Acer having a DVD drive instead of Bluray drive: Bluray media and drives (for PC or stand alone players) are still mighty expensive so even though DVD was not the hottest thing anymore, it was still good enough for large majority of people. Nowadays that might be a lot different with 4K TVs and such.
Most of them, in my experience, you'd get very quiet drive noise no worse than your HDD. Bluray players, on the other hand, in my limited experience, seem to come in 'PS3' 'jet engine' and 'high pitch electrical squeal/whine'... most people either don't have the frequency range to hear that last one to start with or destroyed their hearing in their early teens and so don't notice, but if you're like me and neither of those apply (and you have extra issues on top) it's a legitimate problem.
@@laurencefraserI have a Sony X800M2, a decent UHD Blu-ray player, and it's the quietest disc player I've probably ever had. Standing right next to it you can just barely hear a gentle hum.
I totally loved the PowerDVD rant, it's such an atrocious software. It hasn't changed in 10 years and the default keyboard controls are GARBAGE. What's worse is that it only seems to work with Intel SGX and refuses to play any BluRays on my AMD machine. Thank god for MakeMKV.
The spacer was standard at that time, when 2.5" drives were transitioning from the original 12.5mm to the newer 9.5mm standard. Pretty much every device I had during the period had a 3mm chunk of plastic in the box to basically shim out the drive so it wouldn't rattle. Some retail pack SSDs were still coming with them as little as 5 or so years ago. I am betting that the shim you have is supposed to go UNDER the drive, where you have the paper to insulate, not on top of it. That's where they usually fit.
Your TiVo rant is the gospel. Amen brother. I dont know how TiVo is now, but back in the day, it had the perfect interface. Simple easy to use, intuitive interface, without needless features and options. Distinctive to hear, yet not annoying sound cue, that people instinctively understood - even the grandparents. I know TiVo is still around, licensing their software, but I dont know if the interface has changed. I hope not much, as it was truly one of the best human interface designs for a product.
35:52 TBF, later model PS3 remotes do have IR. but that was so it could talk to your TV and sounds system as a universal remote. The PS3 still used bluetooth.
I was trying to explain why I had a server to the water heater guy, and eventually broke down and was just like, just pirated movies and games basically.
I've mentioned this before but my experience with nvidia ion was using a bare barrel jack powered mitx board by zotac (i did not use a case) and running openelec on it, which was basically barebones linux that ran xbmc/kodi with full hardware decoding of media. That board lasted me from 2009 until 2015 and the nvidia shield tv replaced it for all intents. It could play back virtually everything and was a big upgrade over a modded xbox.
About the first device: are you sure the version with BD drive would actually play Blu-ray movies? I think Windows Media player can't play blurays, because it wasn't licenced or something. I don't know whether Windows Media Center uses the same player or not though, it may play just fine. EDIT: Well, I got my answer in the second part of the video lol
The eSata port on your Dell laptop also accepts USB ports. It sometimes supports usb 3, but most people don’t realize it’s a usb port too.
14 годин тому+3
14:54 I guess I could've. I never got into the HD disc era, but switched from DVDs to streaming services. Affordable BDs came too late and at that point Internet was already servicing my audiovisual needs.
I was working at Worst Buy when the Atom CPUs started being put into netbooks and cheap-o laptops, and I don't ever remember seeing a single device with an Atom in it that I thought was anything close to worth the asking price. Usually, and for $150-$200 more, you could have gotten a semi-decent laptop with an i3, 8GB of RAM, at least 500GB on the HDD (often 750-1000GB), and that was almost always a much better choice for the purchasers than anything with an Atom in it.
I made my media server with DVR quite recently. There are some media in my country that's are available on TV but hard to get via streaming. I love also the variety of things that i could record from tv to watch later.
29:33 there was - i have a HP m9000 Media Centre PC (definately more PC than Media Centre) but it came with the more modern Vista remote (that you're holding a few second earlier), and had a IR receiver built into the combination SD/XD/CF/MS(?) reader. It's just USB however and is functionally the same as the external unit (that one came with the much more boxier XP Media Centre remote) it was great when i turned that machine into a server running debian linux and every time anything IR happened in the same room (HTC VIVE basestations especially) the DMESG output would flood with something along the lines of "mceusb: unable to parse IR code" I do also remember seeing a Microsoft version of that USB receiver and i'm pretty sure Dell made one too. Pretty sure they still work under Windows 11. They worked under 10 so I don't see why they'd remove the drivers but i'll have to test. EDIT: just checked. Still works
15:04 Yea it honestly surprises me just how bad some early optical mice are. You really did need a good mousepad for them. 3m still sells mousepads made to "track the best" that they sold back in the day too. In fact the hard top will give you free mousepad PTSD because it feels exactly like one of those free mousepads with Viagra ads on them or something, at least the ones that weren't cheap cloth. It even creases like them too. I have some mousepads that just don't track with them, the Amazonbasics ones don't track very well with them. Don't get me wrong even the first intellimouse optical mice were better than any ball mouse, but they weren't as fuss free as they are now obviously. But also you should know more about this than me since you've made great videos about this so idk.
In defence of the ION, a friend of mine had the Acer Aspire Revo R3600 back in 2011 - the weird parallelogram Revo you'll find in your google results. He spent a good long while tinkering with it, and finally got it to run XBMC - and it worked a treat. It would not only play any format you could chuck at it (at the time) in hardware, but it also could bitstream any audio stream over HDMI, which to him was a non negotiable critical feature, because he had a serious home theatre setup, and also I believe because decoding audio in software correctly was screwy enough that it didn't sound right (Dolby Digital streams can have a plethora of metadata on how it should be decoded, not just the raw data). This particular Revo didn't have a built in optical drive. But that was of no matter. Why? Because he also had an HP MicroServer N54L - maybe one day you'll pick one of these things up; it's exactly what you think it is - an actual server for your home; HP stripping back their server line to make a little cube of a server suitable for the home. And again, this little thing ROCKED. It had one of the same Athlon Neo CPU because that's all you need to squirt packets of data over your network. It had a cute en vogue design for the time, allowed for a bunch of HDDs to be slapped into it, and was just a great little box for your home storage needs. With this combo I was insanely jealous. XBMC had already had years of development on the Xbox platform, so it was incredibly slick in this iteration. And it was fast. Shockingly fast, because of course XBMC was designed for a 733MHz Pentium 3 with 64MB RAM! Oh and re: the ION, NVIDIA did announce it as a 720p capable gaming platform alongside the Atom CPUs of the time (N280, N330), but this was extremely wishful thinking on their behalf. The N280 was really only competitive with high end Pentium 3's in terms of raw performance. Loved my Atom netbook though as I could emulate machines with ease and I could chuck it in my bag for college. Final bit of tangentially related information - way back in the day, there was a mini PCI-E H.264 decoder you could buy to make your miserable device play content smoothly - the Broadcom Crystal HD - these were mainly installed into old 1st gen Apple TVs where the Wi-Fi card was with XBMC installed to allow for some HD decoding goodness. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
Your rants always leave me with a nice chuckle and a smile on my face. Also I totally forgot that the one Acer product was called the Revo Stack. For some reason my mind remembered that it was its own thing and not part of the Revo product line.
if it wasn't for the remote having to slide into the revo to charge, I'd buy one just for that remote. it's the nicest form factor for a combo keyboard and touchpad I've ever seen.
"Loud HTPC" is why to this day my go-to device for media PC hooked up to the TV is a Mac Mini, running a Redhat based distro because I'm also just that kind of person
Watching this on my Thinkpad T410 - on this thing, the hardware decoding situation is actually the opposite, the hardware decoding can't keep up with 30+ FPS video but CPU decoding works just fine.
Aside from the awesome content, I just want to say how awesome it is that you release your videos under a Creative Commons license. That is very, very cool. Thank you!
And then you had people like me who used an Xbox as a media center pc. You could play your totally legally acquired content, DVDs and Awesome Xbox Games and emulated Nintendo games
29:35 I have an HP desktop sitting around somewhere that came with a Media Center remote and had the IR receiver built in. I'll have to find a model number for you.
If you're asking me, it kinda depends on how that Optiplex is being used. If it's pretty much a Media Center (not necessarily literally that program) machine with a couple digressions into a browser for UA-cam, then yeah, it pretty much is.
@LonelySpaceDetective It was kind of a joke question. We use it only for watching video, so in function, it's absolutely an HTPC. In form, it's nothing like what people think of as an HTPC since it's a bog standard ex-corporate-lease Dell. It's like the opposite of the Zotac since the maker never intended for it to be connected to a TV, just used on a desk.
Fellow Atom enjoyer here, do you have a Fujitsu Loox yet? 1:13:42 So what I'm hearing is that the Ion is to an HTPC/Netbook as a Chromatic Research ISA MPEG accelerator is to any given Pentium. Also, didn't your NC1000 have an Ion?
Minor correction, at least I think it's a correction: The eHome receivers might not be necessary for using the remote itself, just a component of Media Center. When shooting the Niveus video I spent several hours trying to get Windows Media Center to record over composite instead of RF, and found that it absolutely refuses to even try unless you convince it that you have a set-top box (cable, satellite, etc) and go through a whole IR blaster setup process, and if you don't have the eHome, it will simply refuse to proceed until you connect one. This was so frustrating that I internalized it as "the ehome receiver is mandatory." It's sort of true, in that there *is* a function that won't work without it which you may very well have wanted - but can you use the rest of the remote features with a generic receiver? Maybe, I wouldn't be surprised.
I'm pretty sure very early on there was a tuner requirement to use WMC at all, and this could be related to that. Even though I find no mention of this online (well, wikipedia lol). All PCI(e) tuner cards all came with IR ins for usage with IR hubs (there were others than the eHome, in Europe at least), and to use WMC at all you had to have a tuner and maybe later a set-top box was allowed. I found a forum post from 2009 stating that you did need to hook-up the IR hub to either a tuner or a set-top box to use the remote, so you're definitely not wrong. Potentially this requirement was dropped when WMC allowed everyone to use it. Maybe the remote requirements were dropped way after the tuner requirements as some sort of oversight?
edit: i just remembered some part of this is definitely true, because to even use WMC on my PC at all I had to use my xbox as a media extender. otherwise the software refused to boot. I think this is Vista-era? I was also 14 years old so details are a bit muddy
The irony that the ps3 was probably the best off the shelf HTPC. It could play games, bluray, DVD, stream media via the network, play media off a USB drive, had a built in web browser with flash support.
Once my family got one, I canned my home made HTPC as it just did everyone so perfectly.
I still refuse to use anything else than a PC. Nothing beats a real browser and a physical keyboard and pointing device. Fuck typing passwords with a controller. And only on a computer is it easy to play all of my legal digital copies of films and shows.
I was/am an Xbox boy, so I'm trying to find a scenario where the 360 beat out the PS3, in this use case. Maybe you were willing to ignore Blu-ray for Media Center and/or Gears/Halo/Forza?
@@professordetective807the 360 was so loud man.
@@professordetective807The Xbox 360 was able to stream Netflix back when they were streaming via Microsoft silverlight, when the PS3 was unable to. If my opinion counts, I much preferred the 360 controller versus the PS3 controller, and xbox 360 had Halo 3.
@@professordetective807 the fact that the 360 could only play videos at a maximum resolution of 720p still annoys me. Never understood why Microsoft kept it that way making it an utterly inferior media player / streaming device.
"Windows Media Center was a very mature DVD player"
Instantly errors out xD
the fucking makemkv pamphlet is a top tier single digit second visual gag
thank you when I said it out loud I immediately realized that I had to create it or the joke would not fly
I am watching this on my E6420 that I have owned since 2011. Didn't know about the USB 3.0 expansion module, so you just caused a sale on ebay right now. You are officially an influencer ... of a bygone era.
Influencer of a bygone era. Excellent.
You can add 2 more USB3 with a low profile express card adapter as well. It's connected to PCIe (Only 1 lane.) IIRC.
@@Jeff-ss6qt Ooooooooooh, temptation knocks and I am listening. I wonder if I already have one lying around. Knowing my luck it's USB 2.0.
He became that UK moam guy ;)
The USB 3.0 situation was mostly Intel's fault: until the 3rd gen (Ivy Bridge) they didn't have native USB 3.0 ports on the chipset/PCH. Even the MacBooks only started having 3.0 ports in 2012.
even when it was available early usb 3.0 stuff tended to be quite buggy and unstable so for a non tech-savvy audience it probably wasn't worth it.
@@olnnn That too, but most computers didn't bother with USB 3.0 until the chipset included because it needed a separate chip (that costed, you know, money) and was probably buggy.
@@olnnn The 2011 Macs were in a interesting spot because of this: no USB 3.0, but they had the then brand-new and shiny Thunderbolt 1 port that could do 10 Gbps, but anything capable cost an arm and a leg.
I managed to buy a Thunderbolt to USB 3.0 dongle a few years after.
I remember some Texas Instruments USB3.0 chipsets were occasionally compatible with USB3.0 devices
@@olnnn yeah i remember there being a whole thing about 3.0 causing interference with 2.4ghz usb dongles or something
1:04 _"How dare they ask me to pay money for a well-designed, purpose-built device that does a great job at a specific task that I value highly. What fiends! I'll show them, by spending the same amount of money and vastly more time and effort, making something that works almost half as well."_
dicaprio_pointing.png thats right
"The wifi card won't go bad". My wife's laptop's wifi chip recently went bad so catastrophically and brought down the PCIe bus that windows thought the NVME drive had failed. That was fun to diagnose.
Haha, I've had Wifi cards prevent laptops from powering on they failed so badly. Ofc these are all lemons basically, chips which were ticking time bombs from the moment they left the factory, you just lost the silicon lottery. A well manufactured wifi card *should* just work for decades.
Thank you, Guy-behind-us-in-line.
You are always there for us.
22:20 "The geniuses at Acer." A phrase never uttered in their entire history. 🤣
59:46 HDMI only has a single DVI link; DVI's connector also had a dual link mode for higher resolutions. HDMI was almost going to have a double-wide connector (there's even pictures of it somewhere) for dual-link HDMI, but that never shipped. Before HDMI 1.3 you would need dual-link DVI for 1440p.
There was an industry push for 1440p at some point but it wound up getting overshadowed by 3D. 3D and 1440p actually had roughly the same bandwidth demands out of the cable but 3D also meant TV manufacturers didn't need to make new, higher-density panels, so that's what they tried to sell you. For 3D, they could just run them at 120hz (which is also why gaming suddenly got good refresh rates again).
That being said, if you hadn't shown that this thing also had HDMI I would have just accused it of omitting HDMI to reduce patent licensing costs.
Huh. So that explains why my Dell U2711 monitor from 2012 can only do 1080p over HDMI. It’s got dual dual-link DVI ports for that instead!
My first 120hz monitor also only supported that refresh rate using DVI-D
Don't forget the attempt to make 21:9 TVs a thing! The Phillips models I was able to find from that time all had 2560x1080 panels, which would technically qualify for that "higher then 1080p" resolution class...
These were actual TVs sold in TV sizes of the time with normal TV IO (well plus a Dual-Link DVI for obv. Reasons) and menus and such. Nobody bought them tho, since there really wasn't any attempt at making a Gen2 model...
@@Zazzlebips You needed Dual DVI for these monitors, HDMi replaced the need for that.
For Dp Port 1.4, they adopted most features on PC's too, same ?
Thank you so much for filming in 60 fps. I know it's a huge pain in the ass in terms of storage and processing but it makes the videos sooooo much nicer to watch.
thank you for appreciating it!!
@@CathodeRayDudei appreciate it as well. It's so much better on my MacBook or iPhone, and definitely a lot better on my gaming rig too. You're just the best. Love ya, bruv. ❤
@@DeathMetalDerfnow it's time to convince him to film in 240 fps.
@@ax14pz107 my tab can't handle it😊
YES!!! i hate watching videos with tearing during movement cause they didn't record at 60FPS! When you have a high refresh rate monitor 60FPS youtube is almost a must. imo.
Forgot to add the "two of them" kitten thumbnails at 1:00:23
I feel ripped off 😂
FOR SHAME
🐈⬛ 🐈⬛
Subpar
CRD fell off! Can’t even meet the demands of the viewer! (The two of them kittens)
Legit lol'd when the keyboard lit up. Did not see that coming.
It's what the people thought the future would look like in the 80's.
shouted "oh i HATE that" at my screen immediatley
@@famitory I shouted an unironic "WOW, that's kinda cool"
@@famitory I saw that and went "I WANT ONE NOW"
Likewise. It's so much like the little combo Bluetooth keyboard/trackpad I have, but if they'd thought of it in 2010. Very neat, if poorly implemented.
18:11 Get in the Acer, Shinji.
Use the Athlon Neo + NVIDIA ION net-top, Shinji, or you'll have to use the Atom + GMA netbook again.
haha made me spit my drink
The thing about watching movies legally is that pirating is easier. DRM is such a bitch that I can stream a movie illegally faster than trying to figure out how to pay for it.
Please don't call us "computer touchers." I feel like I'm doing something illegal when you phrase it like that....
Yeah, all we do is just strip our computers down bare as we make the most of their-hey wait
This intro is fucking hilarious. Love that you just take the piss out of the history.
hahaha well I lived through it, and even though it was a blast, it was also incredibly silly the entire time. Nothing ever really worked, and even when it did, the illicitly obtained material we were watching on it was usually of such poor quality that you'd be better off with a VHS tape in every way other than convenience. A lot of PC history is ridiculous, which is why I'm so fascinated with it. Glad you enjoyed!
I have never felt so attacked by a YT video as I did during the intro.
Oh, and I am watching this on a distinctly mid Acer laptop-in-a-case hooked up to my living room TV. And it also runs Plex.
@@phelyan “laptop-in-a-case” like a headless laptop hooked to a monitor/tv?
@@phelyan Oh, I think you mean specs-wise lol 😂 laptop-grade power.
Gotta say, did NOT expect Evangelion on DVD to make a cameo appearance
The Eva DVD probably is worth more than the Revo it shipped in.
Evangelion references are everywhere, it seems. Not even CRD is safe from them.
All it did was make me miss ADV :(
Amazing work once again!!! The phenomenon of Gravis managing to make an engaging hour plus video about a product so boring that I would not even bother to pick up the box to see what it was is truly a sight to behold. I also appreciate the change in you presentation style. It seems (to me at least) that in a lot of your more recent videos you have been able to take a much calmer and slightly less "hostile" tone while still clearly communicating the shortcomings of the products even while continuing to make the very blunt jokes and observations which made me fall in love with your content in the first place. Always makes my day whenever I see an upload from you. Have an enjoyable holiday season and a pleasant new year!!!!
Thank you, this is exactly what I want to hear. I've been trying to soften my opinions with humor. happy new year!
@@CathodeRayDude I am going to second that person's comment. I also appreciate the new gentler format of scathing remarks. Oh, and your visual gags are still top-notch.
Omg I've already watched and liked both of your public videos before! Small world
Haha seems like he goes easier on the smaller companies doing weird stuff rather than companies like IBM going off their meds for the Portable. You do see some of the Seething Rage peek through when he discusses CyberLink PowerDVD, as it should because CyberLink is one of those software companies that belongs in the dumpster.
Who remembers the BOXEE box? Walmart bought them to bury them, but it was glorious, the first and last turnkey device of its kind, purpose built to grab metadata and poster art for downloads. So rad.
i do
I saw one thrifting recently, almost got it just for a shelf ornament but it was juuust a bit too expensive.
@@pokemonprimed how much did they want?
I loved mine! It was so easy to use. The remote in particular was absolutely glorious and perfect.
God I loved boxee so much
Holy SHIT. That uh, that remote's party trick was better than the Hyperspace bomb drop. God fucking damn.
not as crazy as the one from crimes and felonies imo
@@giddycadet Oh god that too. That was an atrocity.
@23:20 - happy to help bud. RE-PC for life!
32:03 reminds me of the first wave of Galaxy Fold review units which had this kind of thing and reviewers where peeling the screen off, immediately wrecking the device
Robo helper: “Master, I see your skin is itchy, I shall peel it all off to ease your discomfort” 🤖
Really wanted to see you stick the usb receiver dongle for that keyboard in another computer, see if it works as a generic HID or if there's some special drivers required...
That was a fresh install on Windows 7. So that WAS the generic drivers. The dongle and remote would work just as well on the Zotac.
@@parkerlreed Oh yeah you right. I just posted asking the same thing but obviously stock win 7 wouldn't have special drivers.
the biggest problem is likely the charger - it's probably the sort of thing that a tech savvy person with a 3D printer could solve, but for most people, it's basically useless without the built in battery connector.
@@avrilsegoli there's plenty of hacks to make that work without a 3d printer, even; you could rig up something with the corresponding pogo pins (readily available at digikey and elsewhere) and some perfboard to solder them to, and hold the charger on the device with a clamp or a weight.
Alternately, drill a hole in the side and stick a DC barrel socket in there instead.
I bet it's just 5v USB over those pins, too.
14:30 I don't remember PCs having blu-ray drives ever being that common, even in the 2009-2015 era. From what I remember, most either had a DVD drive, or no drive at all by then.
I’ve never seen a PC with a blu-ray drive in my entire life. But every PC my family ever owned pre-2015 had a DVD drive, and every one since hasn’t.
I bought an expensive Dell XPS in 2012 and it had a BD drive. High end laptop though, I think they tended to include them or at least offer it as an option.
@@justanotheryoutubechannel have only ever seen one pre-builgnwith a Blu-ray drive and it also was an HD-DVD drive made by LG. Other than that they were custom built with the drives.
I have a XPS desktop that has a BD-RW drive I think it's from 15-16
Blu-ray drivers were pretty common on media-focused, 17" laptops, as I recall, as optical drives were being phased out on all other classes of laptop.
PowerDVD, like every legitimate way to play UHD DRM protected content (hint hint, it's only that and Netflix), requires Intel SGX. An x86 instruction extension that hasn't been included in Intel CPUs since Alder Lake.
You wanna know what they did in v.23 to fix this problem? They've thrown out UHD Blu-Ray support entirely. If you wanna play your UHD Blu-Ray in a legitimate way on a machine that is not a dedicated UHD Blu-Ray player you have to somehow aquire an older version of PowerDVD and an Intel CPU between 7th and 11th gen. Neither of which is being sold anymore... And no, AMD never supported SGX, it was an Intel only thing...
In general the whole Streaming thing is kindof infuriating. It's almost like racism against PC users and those who don't wanna upgrade their stuff every few years. Like "Oh? You wanna have more then just Stereo Sound, wanna use HDR or get a video quality better then Standard 1080p UA-cam quality? Don't play on a PC then! Get a Smart TV or Streaming Stick, modern ones at that btw, we don't want AV equipment from 2016!"
meanwhile if you actually want stereo sound you're SOoL surprisingly often: many blurays I've come across just say 'surround sound or go die in a ditch, pesant' ... this is borderline universal with anime, in which case only the English audio will be done that way (complete with audio balancing that leaves you with the option of 'hearing damage from the BGM' or 'dialog so quiet you can't actually make out half the words' if you only have stereo sound), the Japanese audio will be in stereo... and only stereo. Want JP audio in surround sound? nope!
Instead of racism, is more like demonising everything in the name of DRM. Similar to streaming applications not working on rooted phones, or applications not wanting to output video if the screen is not HDCP-compliant. You gotta have their “blessed” devices if you want to be allowed to play with them. It's just that the blessing has a different name each time: signatures, certifications, HDCP, Cinavia, SafetyNet, Play Integrity, SGX, TPM…
So… my CURRENT PC can do things a new one can’t?
(It has an 8th gen intel CPU)
@@laurencefraser Oh yeah, I totally get that. Some people might bring the argument that you could just pay to get Dolby Atmos for headphones and get Virtual Surround that way, but I'll be honest, other then providing some special effects, it's not much different from just using stereo speakers...
Heck, the mixing on some 5.1/7.1 movies is so reliant on the center channel that you're even SoL on a Quadrophonic setup (basically 5.1 minus the center speaker)...
@@laurencefraser Ever heard of downmixing? Every media player codec worth their salt has options to help you set this up according to your preferences. Or you could set up LAV audio filters for the same purpose.
41:50 love the little protogen!!!!
"Hey, wait, this says ZBOX!"
"Z is just as good. In fact, is better, is two more than X."
The gameplay footage is making me hearken back to launching massive ships in Kerbal Space Program on my 2011 Macbook Air (in 2016) and *happily* playing with
You know games on the N64 chug like crazy but I played them happily as a kid not thinking anything was really wrong. Crazy to think Nintendo was putting out games that dropped to single digit frames when anything significant happened on screen, and still expected loads of people to buy it. Perfect Dark had a Hi-Res mode. Why even?
I mean I wouldn't game on a Mac. Well I mean I wouldn't do much of anything on a Mac, but that's just me.
@@cliffordreynolds1835 Because clearly I had a dozen gaming computers to choose from but just chose to play games on a 5+ year old hand-me-down laptop that was solely designed for thinness
@nytpu Hey you have to play the hand you're dealt. I'd rather play on a Mac than nothing at all. I'm just saying it wouldn't be my first choice. Desktops are obviously better, and Windows is better for compatibility as I'm sure you know.
same, I love being able to play most modern games reasonably well at 2560x1600 on my 780M. and in the cases where it's not enough, I'm still happy enough with 1920x1200 (or 1280x800, in rare cases)
1:19 is the mantra for all computer guys. My plex server, home assistant, etc all fit the bill
@@GarlicDogDOTA Klipper 3d printers, Linux desktops, Graphene OS phones and the list goes on
Me and my Franken-OptiPlex SFF PC that I've modded with a Xeon CPU and resizable BAR as a weird HTPC because I dislike TV-centric interfaces and walled gardens.
Generic N100 NAS boards are the new way! I have 70TB connected, running Ubuntu LTS, hosting Jellyfin/all the *arr apps/Transmission/Nzbget. I haven't done this in YEARS but the landscape of streaming services made me put my peg leg on. The largest change I found was that for, at least modern & popular media, Usenet is the method of choice for fast and reliable downloads.
All that to say that for anyone into HTPCs, the N100 can be had for $100 (or 140-180 for the 6-SATA board) in the MicroITX form factor, has Intel QSV for hardware transcoding, and kicks ass. I aggregated the 4 2.5Gbe NICs. Thing just kicks ass, what a gamechanger.
Great video, watched the pre-release and the final. I didn't realize this was even something in the consumer market at any point beyond the high-end devices like the Niveus types.
Where are you finding them that cheap?
@@aprofondirAliExpress, probably
and some percentage of that 70TB-worth of media is slowly getting eroded away by bitflips on your ECC-less memory
@@francistheodorecattebro what. bitflips in RAM aren't corrupting data on a hard drive that you're just reading from. The bitflips comes after the read operation. It doesn't re-write the data it reads. Do you know how computers work
You talked about those fools spending hours lying down under the TV trying to fix the Bluetooth driver on a MythTV box, well god is my witness I was that fool and regret nothing. Now I've grown, matured and moved on, I do it with my TrueNAS.
same
I do have fond memories of an ION computer. I bought a ZOTAC mini-ITX motherboard that was ION based. I forget which Atom it had, but something I found funny was that the ION chip had a heatsink with a fan while the Atom only had a heatsink. The entire reason I got the board was it was cheap and I wanted to build a computer for my Grandparents who had horrible luck with pre-built machines. I put the thing together paired with 4GBs of RAM, a GT710 I got from a friend, a DVD drive with no name on it, an ITX Rosewill case, a PSU from an eMachines whose motherboard died, an 80GB Intel SSD I got from another friend, a 500GB Hitachi HDD, and finally Windows 7 Starter. That computer lasted for 5 years without my Grandparents ever having an issue with it. Then I built them a newer one with all new parts since I had a real job at that point. So I actually do have good memories of an ION machine.
That's so sweet! I'm glad they liked it so much.
Thanks Gravis ❤️ Until now, I had to cross my eyes to see two computers. You've done me a favor.
Oh my god. Not even 2 hours ago, I was thinking "Hm, I wonder when Gravis will release a new video," and here it is!
“Video decoding is hell on CPUs”. Me sadly looking at my computers that cannot decode AV1 via hardware.
One of the few reasons to praise Intel CPU’s. The de/encoders are unsurpassed.
CapTVchilenaShootingStarMax
apple Av1, Final Cut ?
YOU NEED SKILLS ;)
Only use chips that support Hardware encoding, Nvidia or apple silicone !
31:38 I was only recently thinking a keyboard function on the apple magic trackpad would be pretty neat, which basically would be exactly that.
This genuinely had me laughing with the silly moments 😂
Also I had some form of an Nvidia and Intel Atom combo in a Zotac Zbox I got at a surplus sale at my highschool. It made for a really mediocre Linux box I recall. It also has the lovely blue ring. Which fun fact! You can disable it in the BIOS if it wasn't your cup of tea.
Also no! This is not a "My favorite ion device" comment!!!
ZenIsFluffy
Atom did hardware Video encoding, AMD NOT !
Be sure your media player is using the right encoders please.
1:03:36 imma make someone's day, LED dimming tape. It reduces the brightness from about 50-80% and they come in pre-cutout sections to stick over panels so you can still see the lights but they're not blinding. It's such a game changer for me.
At the same time though if they didn't wanna diffuse the light they should've just added an extra resistor or make one beefier to dim the light more.
Elecrical tape works too, I had a really bright always on LED on a power bar that I just stuck about three layers of electrical tape over.
Edit: just got to that part of the video, sniped by CRD.
The intro is so accurate that I felt like I slipped into the 2000s again. Screw your t-shirt
It was actually easier to rip and watch my Blu-rays then it was to play the Blu-ray with the disk in the drive. It worked eventually, but if they want people to play it legally, they should make it easier to play them legally.
oh gosh. anyway, did Blu-ray got any easier to rip nowadays compared to then?
@@FudgeXDD It's fairly easy provided you've got a good drive. I got one recommend by the forums and flashed it. Before flashing the firmware, I could rip just about any Blu-ray at about 2.0x speed. After flashing, I could rip them at higher speeds. It also allows me to rip UltraHD Blu-rays. You'll need certain drives for that. MakeMKV normally takes care of the encryption, I've yet to run into one I've been unable to rip.
I don't really have experience with how it was when Blu-ray was newer tech, but I can definitely tell you it may be easier to just rip them then to try to play them unless you want to deal with crappy software.
That generation of beloved Dell laptop is still my daily driver at home. It aged out at work and does what I need with Ubuntu, after my cat killed my 2011 MacBook pro with water
You should be able to find old i7 notebooks for free, running Windows 11.
or run intel OSX on it ?
@@lucasrem Where, oh where do theh have free notebooks?
Why and how are you talking directly to me about my actual past, sir.
Merry Christmas Gravis! Thanks for the video!
At first, I thought you were saying HEDT not HTPC. I was imagining someone buying a threadripper like chip back in the day to play movies 😂
MultiMedia 2.0 PC ? can it play movies on DVD ?
18:13 PFFFT.... that disc was, at least for a time, probably worth like 30 bucks or something. might be lower now with the blu-ray release in america finally and it on netflix
In my mind, this is an episode in a series called "Middle Guys".
£500 vs $499, the £500 will have included tax (unless it was a business purchase) as it's the same everywhere over here, but the $499 will have had the sales tax of whichever state the purchaser was in added on top. Probably?
Oh and the PS3 works as a media centre until it detects a Cinavia watermark on your legitimate backups and mutes the audio.
Maybe that accounted for some of it, but remember, in 2011 a pound was, like, $1.60.
Computer and electronics in general in the era were notorious for stuff being "priced the same" even though the pound was worth so much more than a dollar.
Thanks for another great video. This is my most preferred style. Merry Christmas
I feel called out. Back when morrowind came out I was 20 years old, living on my own, anything fun was purchased mostly with money found in between couch cushions (inherited couches from the 70s with truly dreadful fabrics and a permanent cigarette smell) and I played every 3d game at 15-30 fps at minimal settings if I was lucky. Still enjoyed 'em.
In regards of the Acer having a DVD drive instead of Bluray drive: Bluray media and drives (for PC or stand alone players) are still mighty expensive so even though DVD was not the hottest thing anymore, it was still good enough for large majority of people. Nowadays that might be a lot different with 4K TVs and such.
That Protogen Toaster reference made me totally giggle.
Furries approve that xD
Do note, that it's his fursona that he uses sometimes on live streams on a different channel.
@karolkozik5918 my brain is blown
One of us, one of us.
21:10 “you don’t hear a normal DVD player either” LIES. LIES SIR.
Most of them, in my experience, you'd get very quiet drive noise no worse than your HDD.
Bluray players, on the other hand, in my limited experience, seem to come in 'PS3' 'jet engine' and 'high pitch electrical squeal/whine'... most people either don't have the frequency range to hear that last one to start with or destroyed their hearing in their early teens and so don't notice, but if you're like me and neither of those apply (and you have extra issues on top) it's a legitimate problem.
@@laurencefraserI have a Sony X800M2, a decent UHD Blu-ray player, and it's the quietest disc player I've probably ever had. Standing right next to it you can just barely hear a gentle hum.
I totally loved the PowerDVD rant, it's such an atrocious software. It hasn't changed in 10 years and the default keyboard controls are GARBAGE.
What's worse is that it only seems to work with Intel SGX and refuses to play any BluRays on my AMD machine. Thank god for MakeMKV.
The spacer was standard at that time, when 2.5" drives were transitioning from the original 12.5mm to the newer 9.5mm standard. Pretty much every device I had during the period had a 3mm chunk of plastic in the box to basically shim out the drive so it wouldn't rattle. Some retail pack SSDs were still coming with them as little as 5 or so years ago.
I am betting that the shim you have is supposed to go UNDER the drive, where you have the paper to insulate, not on top of it. That's where they usually fit.
happy holidays CRD. sending love from across the pond!
Your TiVo rant is the gospel. Amen brother. I dont know how TiVo is now, but back in the day, it had the perfect interface. Simple easy to use, intuitive interface, without needless features and options. Distinctive to hear, yet not annoying sound cue, that people instinctively understood - even the grandparents. I know TiVo is still around, licensing their software, but I dont know if the interface has changed. I hope not much, as it was truly one of the best human interface designs for a product.
0:42 This clip is going on the root of my media "backup" directory. If anyone ever finds it there at least it's going to be funny.
“Or pressing escape to clear an update dialog that appeared over your show” - Too real, man.
4:34 its ok acer, asus and asrock are all the same company in my head too
I can’t not call the latter “Ass-Rock”
@@AllonKirtchik I modded the UEFI logo on mine to say “AssCock”. Classy.
35:52 TBF, later model PS3 remotes do have IR. but that was so it could talk to your TV and sounds system as a universal remote. The PS3 still used bluetooth.
I was trying to explain why I had a server to the water heater guy, and eventually broke down and was just like, just pirated movies and games basically.
41:50 that's certainly an... interesting... toaster...
I've mentioned this before but my experience with nvidia ion was using a bare barrel jack powered mitx board by zotac (i did not use a case) and running openelec on it, which was basically barebones linux that ran xbmc/kodi with full hardware decoding of media. That board lasted me from 2009 until 2015 and the nvidia shield tv replaced it for all intents. It could play back virtually everything and was a big upgrade over a modded xbox.
Ran Openelec for years on a couple of barebone E350 Brazos tiny PCs. Worked well.
About the first device: are you sure the version with BD drive would actually play Blu-ray movies? I think Windows Media player can't play blurays, because it wasn't licenced or something. I don't know whether Windows Media Center uses the same player or not though, it may play just fine.
EDIT: Well, I got my answer in the second part of the video lol
The eSata port on your Dell laptop also accepts USB ports. It sometimes supports usb 3, but most people don’t realize it’s a usb port too.
14:54 I guess I could've. I never got into the HD disc era, but switched from DVDs to streaming services. Affordable BDs came too late and at that point Internet was already servicing my audiovisual needs.
So glad you're back and producing quality videos again.
been a fan of the channel for a while no idea why im not subscribed pretty sure i was, per usual great video love the teardowns of stuff.
hey, I had an E6420 laptop for a while! Thing was built like a tank and I respect the hell out of it
I've seen that kind of delamination occur a lot on touchscreen point of sale systems. Maybe they use the same kind of display?
47:43 Soooo what you're saying is I should buy one of these, yoink the dongle and use the remote on a different machine?
30:17 Maybe the industry reason in this particular case was that it shipped with its own media player 🤔
Nothing quite like coming home after a long day at work and seeing a new upload✨
This is an interesting piece of history I never knew about. Thanks for shining light on it man
I was working at Worst Buy when the Atom CPUs started being put into netbooks and cheap-o laptops, and I don't ever remember seeing a single device with an Atom in it that I thought was anything close to worth the asking price. Usually, and for $150-$200 more, you could have gotten a semi-decent laptop with an i3, 8GB of RAM, at least 500GB on the HDD (often 750-1000GB), and that was almost always a much better choice for the purchasers than anything with an Atom in it.
Now I can't unsee it looking like a slim ps2
I made my media server with DVR quite recently. There are some media in my country that's are available on TV but hard to get via streaming. I love also the variety of things that i could record from tv to watch later.
29:33 there was - i have a HP m9000 Media Centre PC (definately more PC than Media Centre) but it came with the more modern Vista remote (that you're holding a few second earlier), and had a IR receiver built into the combination SD/XD/CF/MS(?) reader. It's just USB however and is functionally the same as the external unit (that one came with the much more boxier XP Media Centre remote)
it was great when i turned that machine into a server running debian linux and every time anything IR happened in the same room (HTC VIVE basestations especially) the DMESG output would flood with something along the lines of "mceusb: unable to parse IR code"
I do also remember seeing a Microsoft version of that USB receiver and i'm pretty sure Dell made one too.
Pretty sure they still work under Windows 11. They worked under 10 so I don't see why they'd remove the drivers but i'll have to test.
EDIT: just checked. Still works
I remember having a Medion PC that had a built in IR Receiver/blaster. I am pretty sure it was indeed just the USB thingamabob built in.
15:04 Yea it honestly surprises me just how bad some early optical mice are. You really did need a good mousepad for them. 3m still sells mousepads made to "track the best" that they sold back in the day too. In fact the hard top will give you free mousepad PTSD because it feels exactly like one of those free mousepads with Viagra ads on them or something, at least the ones that weren't cheap cloth. It even creases like them too.
I have some mousepads that just don't track with them, the Amazonbasics ones don't track very well with them.
Don't get me wrong even the first intellimouse optical mice were better than any ball mouse, but they weren't as fuss free as they are now obviously.
But also you should know more about this than me since you've made great videos about this so idk.
In defence of the ION, a friend of mine had the Acer Aspire Revo R3600 back in 2011 - the weird parallelogram Revo you'll find in your google results.
He spent a good long while tinkering with it, and finally got it to run XBMC - and it worked a treat. It would not only play any format you could chuck at it (at the time) in hardware, but it also could bitstream any audio stream over HDMI, which to him was a non negotiable critical feature, because he had a serious home theatre setup, and also I believe because decoding audio in software correctly was screwy enough that it didn't sound right (Dolby Digital streams can have a plethora of metadata on how it should be decoded, not just the raw data).
This particular Revo didn't have a built in optical drive. But that was of no matter. Why?
Because he also had an HP MicroServer N54L - maybe one day you'll pick one of these things up; it's exactly what you think it is - an actual server for your home; HP stripping back their server line to make a little cube of a server suitable for the home. And again, this little thing ROCKED. It had one of the same Athlon Neo CPU because that's all you need to squirt packets of data over your network. It had a cute en vogue design for the time, allowed for a bunch of HDDs to be slapped into it, and was just a great little box for your home storage needs.
With this combo I was insanely jealous. XBMC had already had years of development on the Xbox platform, so it was incredibly slick in this iteration. And it was fast. Shockingly fast, because of course XBMC was designed for a 733MHz Pentium 3 with 64MB RAM!
Oh and re: the ION, NVIDIA did announce it as a 720p capable gaming platform alongside the Atom CPUs of the time (N280, N330), but this was extremely wishful thinking on their behalf. The N280 was really only competitive with high end Pentium 3's in terms of raw performance. Loved my Atom netbook though as I could emulate machines with ease and I could chuck it in my bag for college.
Final bit of tangentially related information - way back in the day, there was a mini PCI-E H.264 decoder you could buy to make your miserable device play content smoothly - the Broadcom Crystal HD - these were mainly installed into old 1st gen Apple TVs where the Wi-Fi card was with XBMC installed to allow for some HD decoding goodness.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
You called me out big time with the Blu-ray drive.
Your rants always leave me with a nice chuckle and a smile on my face. Also I totally forgot that the one Acer product was called the Revo Stack. For some reason my mind remembered that it was its own thing and not part of the Revo product line.
Good to see you back in the studio!
Can already tell this is up my alley
if it wasn't for the remote having to slide into the revo to charge, I'd buy one just for that remote. it's the nicest form factor for a combo keyboard and touchpad I've ever seen.
dont mind me im here for the morrowind gameplay
"Loud HTPC" is why to this day my go-to device for media PC hooked up to the TV is a Mac Mini, running a Redhat based distro because I'm also just that kind of person
Watching this on my Thinkpad T410 - on this thing, the hardware decoding situation is actually the opposite, the hardware decoding can't keep up with 30+ FPS video but CPU decoding works just fine.
Aside from the awesome content, I just want to say how awesome it is that you release your videos under a Creative Commons license. That is very, very cool. Thank you!
The top film on screens peeling off was a major issue on folding samsungs when they first came out, so Acer isn't the only brand to have that problem.
Excellent production quality
13:15 - I got that reference because kids. 🙃
ITS A CRIMBUS MIRACKALE!
And then you had people like me who used an Xbox as a media center pc. You could play your totally legally acquired content, DVDs and Awesome Xbox Games and emulated Nintendo games
29:35 I have an HP desktop sitting around somewhere that came with a Media Center remote and had the IR receiver built in. I'll have to find a model number for you.
I'm watching this on my living room TV connected to a Dell Optiplex, does that count as an HTPC?
Yes.
If you're asking me, it kinda depends on how that Optiplex is being used. If it's pretty much a Media Center (not necessarily literally that program) machine with a couple digressions into a browser for UA-cam, then yeah, it pretty much is.
@LonelySpaceDetective It was kind of a joke question. We use it only for watching video, so in function, it's absolutely an HTPC. In form, it's nothing like what people think of as an HTPC since it's a bog standard ex-corporate-lease Dell. It's like the opposite of the Zotac since the maker never intended for it to be connected to a TV, just used on a desk.
4:20 Man lays out what's about to happen, and makes it so.
Never disappointed with his videos.
Fellow Atom enjoyer here, do you have a Fujitsu Loox yet?
1:13:42 So what I'm hearing is that the Ion is to an HTPC/Netbook as a Chromatic Research ISA MPEG accelerator is to any given Pentium.
Also, didn't your NC1000 have an Ion?