Well, indeed you can upgrade the GPU, but the GeForce 8200 is hardly inadequate for a TVPC, its fully blu ray capable, in fact its relatively hard to find any kind of *downloaded* video file that it can't play and offload from the CPU. Its really only unoptimized stuff (like Adobe flash) where the CPU goes to work.

I'm from Neuros and as others have suggested, we'd LOVE to use an atom solution. The issue, as fuzzyfuzzyfungus suggested is that we can't anticipate what users will want to use the machine for, and sadly much of that is not optimized. flash 10.1 did not completely solve this problem (and its not available in 64bit yet anyway). Further, flash isn't the only inefficient application out there, and the entire point of our box is flexibility, and that you can run virtually any application you want without hassle. I would love to do what you are doing and go with an atom solution, it would save us money and hassle, and be more efficient. Its very close, but just not quiet there for what we're trying to do just yet. No one will be happier when that day comes.

I'm from Neuros (to get that out of the way) You shouldn't lump ball bearings in with fluid bearings. Fluid bearings combined the long life of ball bearings are are practically silent. But you are right about going big and slow. That's why the product uses a 120mm fan that's speed controlled, in typical use its under 1000 rpm and pretty much dead silent.

Agreed, may flash die the miserable death that is so long overdue.

That's been my experience too, that the dB specs are meaningless because they are so filled with lies. This device is about as quiet as any fanned system gets and in any normal ambient environment you can't tell if its off or on from 3 feet away. You'd all but need to be in a sound proof room to hear it from 6 feet away.

Here's a review of the device with pictures, etc: http://www.geardiary.com/2010/04/10/review-neuros-link/

A 2.8GHz single core is a pretty careful choice. It's a pretty good balance that supports a wide range of content, remember not everything supports multiple cores well (or hardware acceleration for example). This processor does everything up to 1080p24 (what you see on apple.com for example) and also supports flash video, etc. On one hand, there's a great deal of discussion of ION or other graphics centric solutions, which are great when that hardware matches *exactly* what you want to playback, but then try something not optimized (flash for example) and you are very limited. On the other side, there are more powerful CPUs, but the expense (and cooling requirements-noise go up) and in most applications you won't see one lick of improvement, I know because we tested a lot of them before settling on this one.

yep, sure have. It's funny just today in the mail I got a big envelope from a law firm I didn't know, and I put it aside just figuring it was another letter from a patent troll demanding royalties. That's just a routine part of being an electronics manufacturer nowadays. It turned out it was something else for once, but generally big envelope from a law firm you don't know mean patent troll nowadays.

The parent post does a very good job of posing the problem that the NeurosLink is trying to solve (with the exception of composite output which we've left for dead). The traditional embedded devices are more plug and play and a PC is vastly more flexible, how do you combine the benefits of both?

The problems with a HTPC being plug and play are not at the high level. As many posts in this discussion demonstrate, many people have an easy enough time installing XBMC on Linux and the machine works well at the basic level. Its the details where a big amount of effort is needed. Make sure audio over HDMI works. Make sure the remote works and all the buttons are mapped correctly. Make sure you can configure the system entirely with the remote (at a minimum get it on the network). Make sure all videos play flawlessly out of the box, not just downloaded MKV files, but Hulu HD and all the other flash video sites. These are the kinds of little details that its really helpful to have a manufacturer behind. Someone has got to hammer away at the "final 5%" that's required for it to be competitive with any dedicated device.

The good news is that once you get those details taken care of you left with a really powerful, robust flexible system. Obviously many talented folks have been hammering away at the various components for years (XBMC, MythTV, etc) so its really glue that's left to be done.

Gamma is a term we coined to refer to production white box hardware with early software (alpha level integration in this case). See the Neuros Gamma Wiki Page

Well, this combines a HW and SW comparison. Wrt to HW, a modded second hand X Box is an unbeatable value for standard def, period. It was subsidized HW and can't be beat (particuliarly at $100). If you can get past the modding headaches and SD limitations, you won't find a better value. In fact, if you need component and composite connectors, the LINK doesn't support that at all.

That being said, the LINK is many years newer hardware. The processor is 2.8 GHz 64 bit v Xbox's 733 MHz (IIRC) etc. and the LINK has HDMI, HD GPU, etc.

Wrt to SW, the LINK is evolving from its starting point of basically stock Ubuntu with a collection of apps (including XBMC and Boxee) to a more seamless, integrated experience. The app software is all GPL, so parts of many apps will be integrated over time, there is still lots of experimentation ongoing (and getting community input during this period is precisely why we launched to users early)

Joe (from Neuros)

exactly right, and I believe there's a place in the middle. A device with comprehensive playback capabilities (both downloaded content and web video) that operates like a piece of electronics. That's the vision, as many, including the reviewer point out, we're not there yet. We started from the PC side and are evolving to be more electronics like, both software and eventually more stripped down hardware. Our focus since release (and until production- remember this is a gamma product) will be on enhancing the UI for couch use. And, yes it will be a period of experimentation, XBMC, Boxee, Miro all work on the box and are in use by various members of the community. We (neuros) feel this is the sweet spot. No, it's not as cheap (or small) as a straight AppleTV (or the like), and the web interface isn't as couch friendly in the navigation. but its more open, expandable, free standing and comprehensive in terms of access to content and we are working on the shortcomings.

At this point, to a certain extent, you can really view this as a home built effort. It's not home built in the sense you have complete access to all the components, but honestly if there's something you want to customize about it, you can literally buy the parts yourself, or we'll sell you a sub assembly and we've listed all the components line by line on the wiki.

The point is that there are economies of scale of a community working in collaboration directly with the manufacturer on a focused set of hardware. A good example of this is ATI, as mentioned elsewhere, we are working directly with ATI as a customer to solve the issues with the system. I think it stands to reason that we have more influence with ATI as a group than as individual hackers, and in fact you will find ATI/AMD engineers participating directly in our community.

As anyone that's put together one of these systems knows, there are tons of minor details that need to be worked out, and it's vastly more efficient if we join forces on a focused application on a defined hardware platform. That's why we've made sure that engineers at Boxee, XBMC, Miro, etc all have sample hardware.

As mentioned elsewhere the hardware does have direct h264 acceleration and is 1080p capable, athough this has not been full implemented in Linux yet.

the ATI hardware is capable, and believe me, I share the frustration wrt ATI. But understand that we came, like most here, biased against ATI at the outset (and we have ulterior motive or connection with ATI). Despite that, they were able to convince us, both with the offers of support for the project as well as current features that they were the right vendor for this device. This is something we continue to evaluate, but if you do the detailed analysis, there are issues with Linux support for both ATI and nVidia, and either vendor must evolve their Linux performance. The good news is that the playing field for Linux, unlike the desktop, is *vastly * more level on the set-top box side than it is on the desktop. More accurately, slanted to Linux's favor, so I believe this will drive a lot of effort. Obviously the success or failure of this project and those like it will be important too.

the ATI interface is evolving, we (Neuros) is working with them directly to evolve the Linux drivers (both proprietary and open). Today it doesn't yet have the vdpau type interface.

However, ATI specs that this is a full bluray capable card, so it's in the software interfaces. Without that we're currently at the cusp of 1080p (24 fps like the apple.com trailers) but there's clearly improvements coming

I realize that ATI doesn't have the best FOSS reputation, but when we looked at nVidia, ATI had some advantages, particularly on the HDMI side (which nVidia doesn't well support yet) as well as a lot of support for this project, which is obviously important.