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
I used to have an HP Pavilion Elite PC with the Windows Media Center remote, and at the very least, it didn't have a separate external receiver box for it, but I still used it all the time. Perhaps Microsoft still officially licenced the same general hardware in a different form factor which could be integrated into an OEM's PC case, but at the very least that external box wasn't the only option. Though in relation to the previous reply here, that PC did have a tuner card and video inputs and all that.
I remember there was a tutorial online that showed how to install an IR receiver driver that didn't require the receiver itself so Windows Media Center could be tricked into thinking it did have an IR blaster and would let me set up the pay TV box input using one of those Ezcap DC60 clones. At the time, however, I didn't realise the pay TV provider used encrypted DVB-C and I could've connected a DVB tuner directly to the cable point to get access to certain free channels that were unencrypted, but having the box, I could watch paid channels, just that I didn't get guide data in WMC and had to use the guide on the box itself. To be fair, I think WMC had a way to download guide data from some services, but only in some countries, just not where I lived.
@@tehFoxx0rz I had HP Pavilion m9080 and it had a remote receiver integrated in the memorycard reader. The big remote shipped with the desktop also worked on my HP Touchsmart TX2 laptop. Outside of Media Center it would emulate keypresses.
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.
It’s especially funny since “I only make personal backups” is not a legal defence since breaking drm is illegal for most purposes so it’s not that good of a defence
@ so long as the material you are copying doesn’t have any copy protection or drm then yes. Admittedly I’m nitpicking but most people using dvd ripping software are ripping copy protected material - after all it’s what most people are watching in the first place
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.
That was always the thing for me but up until a few years ago. Actually - at times I did manage to get as far as having paid for it, and the f*cking thing of course doesn't work. Ah well I have paid for it so I'd grab the warez one that actually works watch it and go about my life. And then sometimes get pestered by the paid service that I had paid for it but not watched it, and I had x days or hours to go watch it. Ignoring them many times triggered a refund but like after 8 weeks or something, so I'd randomly get 10€ from something I didn't recognize the name of, and then end up spending a bunch of time to unravel what the shit it was. The whole system is so disastrously bad that I hope some mutated supervirus turns their laptops and servers into actual toasters forever. As soon as whoever thought this was a good idea picks up a laptop, it mutates into an old greasy toaster.
Now days I can fetch and DOWNLOAD an entire 4k movie in less time than it takes for the mandatory, FFWD locked, bullshit on the disc to finish and I can get to the actual movie.
@@henryfleischer404 🎶🎶Yo ho, yar har, we go off to watch this movie 🎶🎶🎶 Can't watch it because of DRM, but can crack the DRM and rip it on the same computer. Then play it back in a better media player. With fewer issues and less risk to your computer and personal data because you don't need crapware like CyberLink and whatever likely rootkit it installs.
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.
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.
@@cfg83 i have a few of those, they work well enough but the build quality isnt great on them, really easy tot eh tab to end up on the opposite side of the port and allowing you to somehow plug in a USB drive upside down, just need to be careful when your inserting a USB device. (they also run pretty warm and drain a fair amount of battery power)
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.
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."_
Here in Europe, TiVo wasn't a thing, so your choices were either HDD-equipped DVD recorders or a PC running DVR software, and that's were some of the demand for software like MythTV and commercial equivalents came from. Of course, Cable TV and Satellite TV providers eventually started offering their own DVRs (which means you didn't have to deal with DRM like Macrovision or HDCP and programming them was much easier) so that market started dying off even here in Europe, and eventually the ability of TVs to record free-to-air content to USB HDDs killed it off completely.
@@Shotblur I'm convinced that like 90% of those subscriptions go toward bribing the MPAA not to try suing them out of existence for giving people a way to skip commercials, even though they had already tried that with VCRs and lost. Only once in my life did I see a subscription-free DVR for sale, some black Panasonic box, and it wasn't available for very long.
"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.
My last wifi card to fail was my first wifi card. Didn't even support the N standard and was just regular PCI. It caused a blue screen and an odd power fault
I had a wifi card go bad on a dell latitude, fortunately it didn't break anything else. Actually, I think I got it because the wifi card broke, the school didn't want it any more.
Don't you love how in this day and age any device on about any bus on a PC can still do this? I've only ever seen a bad USB device bring a computer inexplicably to its knees until the exact second it is removed. For PCIe to do it... I'm disappointed, yet not surprised at the same time
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...
HDMI 3D is officially restricted to either 720p60 or 1080p24 (I know, I have an Nvidia 3D Vision setup), so that it uses the exact same bandwidth as 1080p60 (note: HDMI 3D has some rows of black pixels between the left and right eye to allow active shutter glasses to switch, that's why it can't do 1080p30, because it would push the bandwidth just above what is needed for 2D 1080p60). Any 1080p60 via HDMI 3D is non-standard and supported only by a single Acer 3D monitor.
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.
Counterpoint: Acer Aspire R13. The ergonomic hinge mechanism of that laptop is truly ingenious, making this laptop far less of a destroyer of necks than other laptops of this size, while also having the option to turn the device into a somewhat big and cumbersome tablet - and at least on mine, it has lasted for a decade without ever losing any of its stiffness. Literally a perfect design that has never been surpassed (yes, I'll die on that hill). Meanwhile, the touchscreen itself (with additional stylus support, for reasons) is delaminating, unfortunately. The device also has two SSDs in a RAID0 configuration, by the way - from the factory! These two are responsible for it feeling remarkably snappy to this day, despite the even then unimpressive two-banger Intel i5-something mid-range ultrabook CPU. Yet you can't upgrade the RAM, for some reason. I would be very surprised if the combination soldered-on RAM and SSD RAID existed anywhere else. The same hinge mechanism would later find its way into their most high-end Predator model (Triton 900 in 2019), kind of supersized compared to the slim and sleek R13. The R13 was not the first time Acer attempted a hinge like that, by the way. Previously, they had an even more outrageous design with the Aspire R7, which had a single hinge in the center behind the screen, the keyboard pushed forwards towards the user and the touchpad behind the keyboard. I think both the R13 and R7 would make for a fun episode like this one, since they are equal amounts "What were they thinking?" and "Huh, neat." - while also being obscure and old enough that most people have probably never heard of them. Good luck trying to find the Triton 900 though.
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.
It's amazing how many people just leave discs in their players and then get rid of them. Half the Blu-Ray players I've bought had some kids' DVD inside, and the Xbox 360 had a game. It does admittedly make them easier to test before I commit to buying them, in that I only need the place to also be selling a TV and an HDMI cable.
I agree, what a totally inappropriate term. Indeed, it does make what we're doing sound like some kind of criminal act. In fact I'm considering unsubscribing because I'm so genuinely and deeply offended by being referred to in such an insulting and disgusting manner. Personally I prefer the much less loaded terms digital-fiddler or widget-fingerer. I hope Gravis is taking note of our feelings on this matter so that he can be more delicate with our sensitive areas in future.
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
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.
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!
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.
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)
Indeed; I also have a D525 box. Interesting little chip. This was still the original Atom core design, which was an in-order core (no speculative execution, therefore no speculative execution attacks!) that was more or less a souped-up Pentium MMX with 64-bit and SSE2 added.
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.
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 TH-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.
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.
@@oasntet the real solution is obviously to solder alligator clips to the battery terminals and run it on an adjustable bench power supply that definitely wont have a failure mode that sends 10 amps down the powerline because a capacitor died
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.
Come to the dark side (UnRaid), we have cookies - and if a drive fails, we don't even notice for days. This silly little server OS has literally saved terabytes of totally legitimate backups from evaporating on my servers alone.
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.
I'm actually quite impressed at how optimized the dav1d decoder is for devices that don't have hardware AV1, 1080p30 is completely doable with my midrange Samsung tablet without breaking a sweat and a 3rd gen Intel Core i7 laptop chip. Google needs to go ahead and make dav1d the default AV1 encoder on Android already instead of making it opt-in, the default gav1 is a joke in comparison.
This is the most CRD video yet, instant classic. Old (but not vintage) video gear, silly gaming moments, tech teardown, techie breakdown, top notch humor and delivery, topped off with great pacing on the surprises. The whole section about the volume knob was *perfect*. This is one of your best ones, CRD. Thank you for the whole hour of entertainment!
Regarding the quick start guide at 56:30 paper is actually set for press printing in larger pieces called signatures, which are always made up of multiples of 4 of the final page size. You print on the signature, then you cut, fold, and bind the signature into the smaller sized pages of paper that make up the book or booklet. So those foldout quick start guides are just the signature folded, but not cut or bound, which saves them money. I'd bet the larger signature + printing on only one side was cheaper than the cost of printing on both sides on a smaller signature.
@@CathodeRayDude this is also why if you look at many books, especially novels, there are blank pages at the back. Just extra pages in the signature that there’s no text for. Count them, they’ll add up with the rest of a book to a multiple of 4. Finally, books are actually bound from the center, so you can often feel the differences between the signatures in the binding (especially in hardcovers) going from the center out.
@@Arivia1 Now knowing this, I wonder how common it is for books to have additional pages added with this "multiples of 4" thing in mind. Like a "well, if we have to have a multiple of 4, we may as well _use_ those extra pages" kind of thing. I'm guessing it probably doesn't happen that often though, since there's still the cost of _printing_ those additional pages; ink and stuff.
@ the most common use? Those pages at the end that are blank except for the word notes on top! I’m not actually a printer so I can’t be sure but if you’re doing full color printing end to end you want to use every page (think coffee table art books, textbooks, etc.) Prose printed in black and white they commonly just leave the extra pages blank.
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.
£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 remember telling my friend in the late '90s when the first tv's with built-in dvd appeared that in the future all tv's would all have built-in pc's. He declared me mad.
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.
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
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!!!
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.
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.
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.
@@LordVarkson morrowind doesnt have stable performance on hardware made yesterday its just 400-1000fps instead of 5-40 oblivion does the same thing but not nearly as bad
Even used on eBay you're looking at spending a minimum of $800 for a Cinema 1 which was the all-in-one unit that could play blu-rays and also had the built-in media store/server, The k series players and servers when you are able to find them in working condition and they haven't suffered from the capacitor plague issue are also expensive it's about 200 to $500 for a player and starting around $400 to $900 for a server depending on storage also the drives are proprietary and no you can't just put a regular IDE drive in The enclosures like you would for any other server they have a security sector just like the OG Xbox 360 hard drives
Also a lot of the players and servers were intended to be rack mounted in a dedicated AV system and installed and maintained by a professional AV integrator meaning a lot of the players don't have remotes or even IR receivers because they were intended to be used with a professionally installed and programmed automation system like a control 4, savant or similar system and they had IR blaster jacks and DB9 serial to integrate with that system and you would control it from an iPad. The smaller players however that were designed for auxiliary TVs like in a kid's room and we're about the size of a small Dell or HP think client did have a remote and did have an IR receiver on them because they were meant to be stuck under a TV instead of in an AV or network rack
Pro tip, jurisdiction does not matter if they get a search warrant. They will just let the pd from that jurisdiction know they are going in to serve the warrant and that pd will probably go with them to see what horrors they uncover.
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.
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.
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.
TLDR: they did change it, but older devices have the old UI. AFAIK there are three basic TiVo UIs: the old SDUI, the middle aged HDUI, and the new TE4/Hydra. Before 2010 you would've been using the SDUI. The HDUI is an HD version which is mostly the same but also adds some useful features (a PIP screen so you can keep watching when using the menus, and also some apps which personally don't use). TE4 is totally different and is "modern". I've heard most users coming from older TiVos generally dislike it. I haven't used it.
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 know what's even more fun about PowerDVD? It technically has support for UHD Blu-ray discs. But the system requirements to play them are absolutely bonkers: an Intel Core CPU between 7th and 10th generation (newer Intel CPUs and anything AMD are unsupported) with integrated graphics, a motherboard supporting Intel SGX, a display supporting HDCP 2.2, a certified UHD Blu-ray drive (there exist "UHD friendly" drives technically capable of reading these discs without the certification; these won't work), and no discrete GPU installed in the system. I don't know in what world this is remotely reasonable...
I'm from Italy and I've discovered your channel just today and subscribed immediately. I think I will watch almost all your videos starting from this one.
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.
That h.264 hardware decoder is a successor to MPEG-2 video decoder cards of the '90s, which enabled DVD playback on even the most anemic of Pentium-class CPus. Later, these were often integrated into TV tuner cards. Slightly earlier, there were MPEG cards that were intended for FMV-heavy games. Those tended to be combined with sound cards.
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.
The lack of Blue Ray support isn't that shocking when you consider the lack of Blue Ray uptake. Like even today, if you go to a place where you can buy movies on disc, the DVD section will be WAAAAY bigger than the Blue Ray section.
"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
My HTPC is doing just fine. I don't have to hunt down anything across four or five streaming services, or worry about the content being altered because of somebodies fee-fee's got hurt about a word. The trouble is finding good entertainment.
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
Video request: WebTV. Had one of those as a kid and it was terrible. But it was a really fascinating attempt at bringing computing to the living room television... with horrible results.
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.
I actually did think it was weird that you seemed so enthusiastic about that volume wheel. It makes sense that you were just noting it for later ridicule, not praise.
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.
I do PC refurbishing, we get a lot of those E6420 & related. We get a lot of them where the optical drive has been replaced with this fake desktop optical drive, complete with fake button, and it just houses 1x 2.5" SSD. So if you really want to upgrade the pipe on your sneakernet...
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.
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.
หลายเดือนก่อน +4
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.
Same for me, but to the point that I still sometimes buy new releases on dvd rather than blu-ray, simply because I don’t want to hassle hooking up a new player to the tv. For me, and many other people, dvd is just good enough appearently
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
I used to have an HP Pavilion Elite PC with the Windows Media Center remote, and at the very least, it didn't have a separate external receiver box for it, but I still used it all the time. Perhaps Microsoft still officially licenced the same general hardware in a different form factor which could be integrated into an OEM's PC case, but at the very least that external box wasn't the only option. Though in relation to the previous reply here, that PC did have a tuner card and video inputs and all that.
@@tehFoxx0rzdidn't see your comment first, but yeah HP was putting them in some of the DV series laptops too
I remember there was a tutorial online that showed how to install an IR receiver driver that didn't require the receiver itself so Windows Media Center could be tricked into thinking it did have an IR blaster and would let me set up the pay TV box input using one of those Ezcap DC60 clones. At the time, however, I didn't realise the pay TV provider used encrypted DVB-C and I could've connected a DVB tuner directly to the cable point to get access to certain free channels that were unencrypted, but having the box, I could watch paid channels, just that I didn't get guide data in WMC and had to use the guide on the box itself. To be fair, I think WMC had a way to download guide data from some services, but only in some countries, just not where I lived.
@@tehFoxx0rz I had HP Pavilion m9080 and it had a remote receiver integrated in the memorycard reader. The big remote shipped with the desktop also worked on my HP Touchsmart TX2 laptop. Outside of Media Center it would emulate keypresses.
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
Probably DRM-related, and it worked fine afterwards.
Oooh mature you say? 👵
Hey *I’m* mature and I error out constantly.
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
It’s especially funny since “I only make personal backups” is not a legal defence since breaking drm is illegal for most purposes so it’s not that good of a defence
It probably would be a legal defense for using existing software to make those backups, just not necessarily for the development of that software.
@ so long as the material you are copying doesn’t have any copy protection or drm then yes. Admittedly I’m nitpicking but most people using dvd ripping software are ripping copy protected material - after all it’s what most people are watching in the first place
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.
This is what Gabe figured out
That was always the thing for me but up until a few years ago. Actually - at times I did manage to get as far as having paid for it, and the f*cking thing of course doesn't work. Ah well I have paid for it so I'd grab the warez one that actually works watch it and go about my life. And then sometimes get pestered by the paid service that I had paid for it but not watched it, and I had x days or hours to go watch it. Ignoring them many times triggered a refund but like after 8 weeks or something, so I'd randomly get 10€ from something I didn't recognize the name of, and then end up spending a bunch of time to unravel what the shit it was. The whole system is so disastrously bad that I hope some mutated supervirus turns their laptops and servers into actual toasters forever. As soon as whoever thought this was a good idea picks up a laptop, it mutates into an old greasy toaster.
Now days I can fetch and DOWNLOAD an entire 4k movie in less time than it takes for the mandatory, FFWD locked, bullshit on the disc to finish and I can get to the actual movie.
I legally obtained a blu-ray of Char's Counterattack, but I can't actually watch it on my computer because of DRM.
@@henryfleischer404 🎶🎶Yo ho, yar har, we go off to watch this movie 🎶🎶🎶
Can't watch it because of DRM, but can crack the DRM and rip it on the same computer. Then play it back in a better media player. With fewer issues and less risk to your computer and personal data because you don't need crapware like CyberLink and whatever likely rootkit it installs.
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
Thank you, Guy-behind-us-in-line.
You are always there for us.
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 ;)
@@cfg83 i have a few of those, they work well enough but the build quality isnt great on them, really easy tot eh tab to end up on the opposite side of the port and allowing you to somehow plug in a USB drive upside down, just need to be careful when your inserting a USB device. (they also run pretty warm and drain a fair amount of battery power)
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.
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
They wanted us to pay a subscription and back then we had the spine to be upset about it
Here in Europe, TiVo wasn't a thing, so your choices were either HDD-equipped DVD recorders or a PC running DVR software, and that's were some of the demand for software like MythTV and commercial equivalents came from. Of course, Cable TV and Satellite TV providers eventually started offering their own DVRs (which means you didn't have to deal with DRM like Macrovision or HDCP and programming them was much easier) so that market started dying off even here in Europe, and eventually the ability of TVs to record free-to-air content to USB HDDs killed it off completely.
@@Shotblur I'm convinced that like 90% of those subscriptions go toward bribing the MPAA not to try suing them out of existence for giving people a way to skip commercials, even though they had already tried that with VCRs and lost. Only once in my life did I see a subscription-free DVR for sale, some black Panasonic box, and it wasn't available for very long.
story of my life
"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.
My last wifi card to fail was my first wifi card. Didn't even support the N standard and was just regular PCI. It caused a blue screen and an odd power fault
I had a wifi card go bad on a dell latitude, fortunately it didn't break anything else. Actually, I think I got it because the wifi card broke, the school didn't want it any more.
Don't you love how in this day and age any device on about any bus on a PC can still do this?
I've only ever seen a bad USB device bring a computer inexplicably to its knees until the exact second it is removed. For PCIe to do it... I'm disappointed, yet not surprised at the same time
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 ?
HDMI 3D is officially restricted to either 720p60 or 1080p24 (I know, I have an Nvidia 3D Vision setup), so that it uses the exact same bandwidth as 1080p60 (note: HDMI 3D has some rows of black pixels between the left and right eye to allow active shutter glasses to switch, that's why it can't do 1080p30, because it would push the bandwidth just above what is needed for 2D 1080p60). Any 1080p60 via HDMI 3D is non-standard and supported only by a single Acer 3D monitor.
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)
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.
22:20 "The geniuses at Acer." A phrase never uttered in their entire history. 🤣
Counterpoint: Acer Aspire R13. The ergonomic hinge mechanism of that laptop is truly ingenious, making this laptop far less of a destroyer of necks than other laptops of this size, while also having the option to turn the device into a somewhat big and cumbersome tablet - and at least on mine, it has lasted for a decade without ever losing any of its stiffness. Literally a perfect design that has never been surpassed (yes, I'll die on that hill). Meanwhile, the touchscreen itself (with additional stylus support, for reasons) is delaminating, unfortunately. The device also has two SSDs in a RAID0 configuration, by the way - from the factory! These two are responsible for it feeling remarkably snappy to this day, despite the even then unimpressive two-banger Intel i5-something mid-range ultrabook CPU. Yet you can't upgrade the RAM, for some reason. I would be very surprised if the combination soldered-on RAM and SSD RAID existed anywhere else.
The same hinge mechanism would later find its way into their most high-end Predator model (Triton 900 in 2019), kind of supersized compared to the slim and sleek R13. The R13 was not the first time Acer attempted a hinge like that, by the way. Previously, they had an even more outrageous design with the Aspire R7, which had a single hinge in the center behind the screen, the keyboard pushed forwards towards the user and the touchpad behind the keyboard.
I think both the R13 and R7 would make for a fun episode like this one, since they are equal amounts "What were they thinking?" and "Huh, neat." - while also being obscure and old enough that most people have probably never heard of them. Good luck trying to find the Triton 900 though.
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.
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 :(
It's amazing how many people just leave discs in their players and then get rid of them. Half the Blu-Ray players I've bought had some kids' DVD inside, and the Xbox 360 had a game. It does admittedly make them easier to test before I commit to buying them, in that I only need the place to also be selling a TV and an HDMI cable.
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
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
"Computer lovers" would be a more app... oh, nevermind.
I agree, what a totally inappropriate term.
Indeed, it does make what we're doing sound like some kind of criminal act. In fact I'm considering unsubscribing because I'm so genuinely and deeply offended by being referred to in such an insulting and disgusting manner.
Personally I prefer the much less loaded terms digital-fiddler or widget-fingerer. I hope Gravis is taking note of our feelings on this matter so that he can be more delicate with our sensitive areas in future.
@@theParticleGod Lol what about us that use it as a silly term of endearment?
@@computer_toucherThey’re joking lol
@23:20 - happy to help bud. RE-PC for life!
RE-PC and Grocery Outlet the two places I'll listen to queue dwellers.
"Hey, wait, this says ZBOX!"
"Z is just as good. In fact, is better, is two more than X."
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” 🤖
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.
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.
Thanks Gravis ❤️ Until now, I had to cross my eyes to see two computers. You've done me a favor.
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.
41:50 love the little protogen!!!!
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)
Fun fact, the Atom CPU in the 2nd machine is not affected by Spectre and Meltdown, I have the same CPU in a mini-desktop.
Indeed; I also have a D525 box. Interesting little chip. This was still the original Atom core design, which was an in-order core (no speculative execution, therefore no speculative execution attacks!) that was more or less a souped-up Pentium MMX with 64-bit and SSE2 added.
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.
Really interesting teardown and comparison. Thanks for the vid!
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 TH-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.
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.
@@oasntet
the real solution is obviously to solder alligator clips to the battery terminals and run it on an adjustable bench power supply that definitely wont have a failure mode that sends 10 amps down the powerline because a capacitor died
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
Come to the dark side (UnRaid), we have cookies - and if a drive fails, we don't even notice for days. This silly little server OS has literally saved terabytes of totally legitimate backups from evaporating on my servers alone.
In my mind, this is an episode in a series called "Middle Guys".
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.
“Or pressing escape to clear an update dialog that appeared over your show” - Too real, man.
“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 !
@@lucasrem My laptop is too old by now, made before AV1 became popular. Desktop has an RTX 2060 GPU, need to upgrade.
I'm actually quite impressed at how optimized the dav1d decoder is for devices that don't have hardware AV1, 1080p30 is completely doable with my midrange Samsung tablet without breaking a sweat and a 3rd gen Intel Core i7 laptop chip. Google needs to go ahead and make dav1d the default AV1 encoder on Android already instead of making it opt-in, the default gav1 is a joke in comparison.
@@neuronic85 Yup. An ultra low-end 15W portable i3 can transcode multiple 4K HDR streams without even breaking a sweat.
This is the most CRD video yet, instant classic.
Old (but not vintage) video gear, silly gaming moments, tech teardown, techie breakdown, top notch humor and delivery, topped off with great pacing on the surprises. The whole section about the volume knob was *perfect*.
This is one of your best ones, CRD. Thank you for the whole hour of entertainment!
Regarding the quick start guide at 56:30 paper is actually set for press printing in larger pieces called signatures, which are always made up of multiples of 4 of the final page size. You print on the signature, then you cut, fold, and bind the signature into the smaller sized pages of paper that make up the book or booklet. So those foldout quick start guides are just the signature folded, but not cut or bound, which saves them money. I'd bet the larger signature + printing on only one side was cheaper than the cost of printing on both sides on a smaller signature.
huh! TIL, thanks.
@@CathodeRayDude this is also why if you look at many books, especially novels, there are blank pages at the back. Just extra pages in the signature that there’s no text for. Count them, they’ll add up with the rest of a book to a multiple of 4. Finally, books are actually bound from the center, so you can often feel the differences between the signatures in the binding (especially in hardcovers) going from the center out.
@@Arivia1 Now knowing this, I wonder how common it is for books to have additional pages added with this "multiples of 4" thing in mind. Like a "well, if we have to have a multiple of 4, we may as well _use_ those extra pages" kind of thing.
I'm guessing it probably doesn't happen that often though, since there's still the cost of _printing_ those additional pages; ink and stuff.
@ the most common use? Those pages at the end that are blank except for the word notes on top! I’m not actually a printer so I can’t be sure but if you’re doing full color printing end to end you want to use every page (think coffee table art books, textbooks, etc.) Prose printed in black and white they commonly just leave the extra pages blank.
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.
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!
Merry Christmas Gravis! Thanks for the video!
£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.
@@random832 Meanwhile us non-island Europeans had to deal with a mainland tax of at least €100 on top of what the Brits had to pay.
USD prices never include tax. It varies to much from state to state and even city to city within a state.
although it can rip CDs and probably burn them
I remember telling my friend in the late '90s when the first tv's with built-in dvd appeared that in the future all tv's would all have built-in pc's. He declared me mad.
He won't admit they're PCs
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.
It was atrocious even 20+ years ago, when there was at least some competition left.
Christmas Eve with Cathode Ray Dude. Thank you!
Thanks for another great video. This is my most preferred style. Merry Christmas
happy holidays CRD. sending love from across the pond!
The intro is so accurate that I felt like I slipped into the 2000s again. Screw your t-shirt
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
That’s just how Morrowind ran on period hardware.
@@LordVarkson
morrowind doesnt have stable performance on hardware made yesterday
its just 400-1000fps instead of 5-40
oblivion does the same thing but not nearly as bad
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.
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.
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 ?
You need to do a feature on the Kaliedoscope AV system - What a monster that was! Possibly the most expensive home video player ever made.
I've considered it - there's part of one at the local ecycle store that I need to take another look at.
Even used on eBay you're looking at spending a minimum of $800 for a Cinema 1 which was the all-in-one unit that could play blu-rays and also had the built-in media store/server, The k series players and servers when you are able to find them in working condition and they haven't suffered from the capacitor plague issue are also expensive it's about 200 to $500 for a player and starting around $400 to $900 for a server depending on storage also the drives are proprietary and no you can't just put a regular IDE drive in The enclosures like you would for any other server they have a security sector just like the OG Xbox 360 hard drives
Also a lot of the players and servers were intended to be rack mounted in a dedicated AV system and installed and maintained by a professional AV integrator meaning a lot of the players don't have remotes or even IR receivers because they were intended to be used with a professionally installed and programmed automation system like a control 4, savant or similar system and they had IR blaster jacks and DB9 serial to integrate with that system and you would control it from an iPad. The smaller players however that were designed for auxiliary TVs like in a kid's room and we're about the size of a small Dell or HP think client did have a remote and did have an IR receiver on them because they were meant to be stuck under a TV instead of in an AV or network rack
Great stuff as always
Pro tip, jurisdiction does not matter if they get a search warrant. They will just let the pd from that jurisdiction know they are going in to serve the warrant and that pd will probably go with them to see what horrors they uncover.
Why and how are you talking directly to me about my actual past, sir.
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.
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.
Nowadays, when nearly everyone and their grandmother has a 4K TV, DVDs are actually outselling Blu Ray discs. Can you believe it?
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.
TLDR: they did change it, but older devices have the old UI.
AFAIK there are three basic TiVo UIs: the old SDUI, the middle aged HDUI, and the new TE4/Hydra. Before 2010 you would've been using the SDUI. The HDUI is an HD version which is mostly the same but also adds some useful features (a PIP screen so you can keep watching when using the menus, and also some apps which personally don't use). TE4 is totally different and is "modern". I've heard most users coming from older TiVos generally dislike it. I haven't used it.
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 know what's even more fun about PowerDVD? It technically has support for UHD Blu-ray discs. But the system requirements to play them are absolutely bonkers: an Intel Core CPU between 7th and 10th generation (newer Intel CPUs and anything AMD are unsupported) with integrated graphics, a motherboard supporting Intel SGX, a display supporting HDCP 2.2, a certified UHD Blu-ray drive (there exist "UHD friendly" drives technically capable of reading these discs without the certification; these won't work), and no discrete GPU installed in the system. I don't know in what world this is remotely reasonable...
I'm from Italy and I've discovered your channel just today and subscribed immediately. I think I will watch almost all your videos starting from this one.
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.
That h.264 hardware decoder is a successor to MPEG-2 video decoder cards of the '90s, which enabled DVD playback on even the most anemic of Pentium-class CPus. Later, these were often integrated into TV tuner cards. Slightly earlier, there were MPEG cards that were intended for FMV-heavy games. Those tended to be combined with sound cards.
@ had a realmagic card too!
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.
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.
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.
It wouldn't surprise me if "Tivoization" caused a lot of nerds to not touch them out of spite. I can't blame them honestly.
Nothing quite like coming home after a long day at work and seeing a new upload✨
hey, I had an E6420 laptop for a while! Thing was built like a tank and I respect the hell out of it
I JUST bought one of those Zotac ZBOX PCs with the Blu-Ray drive for a future video. Can't wait to torture mine
The lack of Blue Ray support isn't that shocking when you consider the lack of Blue Ray uptake. Like even today, if you go to a place where you can buy movies on disc, the DVD section will be WAAAAY bigger than the Blue Ray section.
"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
My HTPC is doing just fine. I don't have to hunt down anything across four or five streaming services, or worry about the content being altered because of somebodies fee-fee's got hurt about a word. The trouble is finding good entertainment.
Homeboy just insulted the entire linux community in less than 90 seconds. Impressive.
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
The Netflix version is censored though, Probably the blu-ray too. Evangelion could never be made today.
@LordVarkson not really
So glad you're back and producing quality videos again.
Merry Chrysler to me new CRD video
Video request: WebTV. Had one of those as a kid and it was terrible. But it was a really fascinating attempt at bringing computing to the living room television... with horrible results.
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.
I actually did think it was weird that you seemed so enthusiastic about that volume wheel. It makes sense that you were just noting it for later ridicule, not praise.
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.
I do PC refurbishing, we get a lot of those E6420 & related. We get a lot of them where the optical drive has been replaced with this fake desktop optical drive, complete with fake button, and it just houses 1x 2.5" SSD. So if you really want to upgrade the pipe on your sneakernet...
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.
Christmas Dude drop!!!
🎅 🎄 ⛄
I've seen that kind of delamination occur a lot on touchscreen point of sale systems. Maybe they use the same kind of display?
Have a happy holidays Cathode Ray Dude
Now I can't unsee it looking like a slim ps2
Happy belated new year to you, Gravis. Hope you are doing well in these trying times of ours
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.
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.
Same for me, but to the point that I still sometimes buy new releases on dvd rather than blu-ray, simply because I don’t want to hassle hooking up a new player to the tv. For me, and many other people, dvd is just good enough appearently
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.
41:50 that's certainly an... interesting... toaster...