Samsung-LN32C450 + Asus Eee Box suggestion

[Cpl Ledanek]

So we finally replaced our dying tube TV with a Samsung-LN32C450 (wife still not satisfied its a good tv) so I was thinking of adding an Asus Eeepc to it so she can watch her Youtubes without having to go to our desktop.

I need a couple suggestions:
--- will the Asus Eee Box do as promised? I saw one @ Fry's for $199.
--- need a All-in-One Remote for the Samsung and for our DirectTV something basic.
--- need a wireless keyboard. I like the Logitech Bluetooth DiNovo but is expensive...need something small with trackpad so I can forgo the mouse.

advance thanks

[Serra]

Whether the EEE will do what you want may depend on the model. In my case, I used an atom-based PC (Atom 330 I believe) with an Ion chipset for an HTPC and it was a miserable failure (in my mind) because it would not properly play Hulu at HD resolutions. Eventually they did come out with drivers that would allow the nVidia-based Ion to do Flash in hardware and it all worked out, but until then the CPU just didn't have the power. So if you want to use an Atom-based PC I would say to make sure it's ION based or using a discrete GPU that can handle flash in hardware.

I also noticed that during blu-ray playback it could start to get choked up a bit and skip a frame every so often. I was able to fix that issue by simply removing the copy protection and burning blu-ray images to hard drive though, as after that the GPU handled all the video and the CPU utilization sits at 1%. I'm not sure what kind of GPU the EEE's come with these days, but I would make sure it can do HD playback in hardware as well for similar reasons.

While all that was going on I went and picked up a quad core athlon mini-itx system for about the same price and got a lot better use out of it. I decommissioned it once the flash-friendly drivers came out though, simply because with that done I had no more problems and was happier with the much lower power usage of the atom system.

[Cpl Ledanek]

thanks Serra

I have no plan on doing anything hi-def thru this monitor, coz I'm afraid she might start camping in bed.

streaming some of my mp4 from other pc (see sig) would be nice, and 1080 is not a must for me...in fact must of my mp4 were done with Handbrake in the intent of output to my iPod Touch...so not sure what quality I can view those mp4 on a 32"

I did come across a better nettop, Acer Aspire Revo AR3610-U2002 Intel Atom 330(1.60GHz) 2GB DDR2 250GB NVIDIA ION graphics Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit.

maybe this will suffice?