VidaBox's RoomClientHD streams Blu-ray, other 1080p content to your HDTV
By Darren Murph 
posted Oct 2nd 2008 7:00PM
posted Oct 2nd 2008 7:00PM
posted Oct 2nd 2008 7:00PM
The percentage of sales people that recommend Samsung HDTVs.
Salespeople are also becoming less likely to recommend LCD sets over plasma sets, which goes against the industry trend.
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This is based on AOpen MP-45D if anyone is curious.
The VidaBoxes don't seem to be distinguishable from Vista Media Centers...
This kind of looks like a small version of a VMC PC, but intended to act as if it were an extender. Seeing how these interact with a real network would be interesting.
How much ? cant find a price anywhere on there page or resellers
Yeah, that's an AOpen miniPC Duo. It looked familiar as I just put one together today! Very nice little machines by the way.
Looks like building this little box yourself would probably cost about $1250.
Amazon has the barebones kit for $380 (free ship), 2x2gb DDR2 800 SoDIMMs $77 shipped newegg, 800Mhz FSB Socket P Core Duo $249-335 shipped newegg, 60gig 7200RPM 2.5" Hitachi SATA 1.5 drive, $87 shipped newegg, Sony optiarc 2x slim Bluray combo reader (DVD/CD writer) $337 shipped newegg. Vista Premium $100 shipped newegg. Plus you'll want a DVI to HDMI adapter of some sort ($10 to 15 shipped from anywhere).
The onboard codec should decode 7.1, but it looks like you'd be physically restricted to 5.1 analog outputs. There's some sort of SPDIF converter (may be able to plug into one of the jacks as optical, like on a mindisc player, suspect it would be limited to 5.1), and a DVI-VGA adapter in the box, so if you have D-sub in that isn't occupied, maybe you'd prefer that to HDMI.
That's more than I'd probably pour into a box like that, but it sounds like it might be able to do some gaming as well (claims to have a DX10 chipset). I doubt it would run Crysis.
First of it is not a true "extender" as it doesn't support cablecard streaming from the main pc. To me this thing will be way overpriced and with the lack of cablecard support won't be worth the money or anywhere close.