CES 2006 - Day 2: Blu-ray/HD-DVD, PureVideo H.264, Viiv, Centrino Duo and a lot more
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Manveer Wasson on January 7, 2006 3:07 AM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
Intel's Viiv at the Show
Given how much Intel has been talking about Viiv and how excited they were about it, you would expect to see an overwhelming number of absolutely breathtaking designs; after all, Viiv is supposed to be much more than just a rebranded MCE desktop. We are supposed to see new form factors, out of the box designs and all in all, things you would want to see in your living room. Unfortunately, what was shown off at the show was far from that. There were some nice looking designs, but the vast majority either looked like PCs with a jog dial on the front or bad attempts at disguising a PC as CE hardware.
Before we get to what was well done, let's look at what wasn't. We'll start off with Acer's Viiv PC, which really looks no different than the first generation MCE PCs that came out two years ago:
A number of companies took the same approach as Hisense, however the case just doesn't convince the end user that they are looking at a high end, stylish CE device - instead it looks like something a PC case manufacturer would make:
Shuttle's Viiv PC is a bit more stylish looking:
And Fujitsu also did a fairly decent job with their Viiv offering:
For users who aren't interested in a living room PC and instead want a very capable desktop PC then offerings like the HP pictured below or the Acer from earlier will obviously be a better fit:
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DeathByDuke - Saturday, January 7, 2006 - link
damn right,electronic paper!
yay!
itd be cool to open a book of encyclopedia britannica and have each page display scrolling text from each article, and videos for each article too, all stored on some multi Gb flash storage in the book covers
highlandsun - Saturday, January 7, 2006 - link
All of the new display technologies look really intriguing. And I think it's about time someone got Uhura's earpiece done right.ComatoseDelirium - Saturday, January 7, 2006 - link
-Great News For AGP Users, I heard many claims that H.264 decoding wouldn't be possible, and is "broken" on the GeForce 6 series AGP cards. Good to hear from the horses mouth (owner of a 6600GT).
BTW The article index is messed up, the correct pages do not appear, can someone confirm this?
s2kpacifist - Saturday, January 7, 2006 - link
Need...OLED display...now... I hope they fix the problem with the life of the blue soon.shabby - Saturday, January 7, 2006 - link
Definetly good to hear, but its wierd that the broken cards can decode h.264 but cant accelerate wmv9.I really hope this hddvd/bluray shit gets worked out, i have no intention of buying players from both camps. Could of swore i saw a company come out with a player that read both formats some time ago.
Cygni - Saturday, January 7, 2006 - link
h.264 is accelerated by simply "reprograming", if you will, the standard APU's and hardware on the card. No special stuff is needed. Theoretically, its possible with ANY modern GPU. Just gotta have the drivers to do it, assuming the cards got the juice to do it. The dead video decode engine on the early 6800 AGP cards was on the other hand a specially designed piece of hardware only for decode.Nobody Else - Saturday, January 7, 2006 - link
I believe that was Samsung that intends to come out eith a dual player.http://digital-lifestyles.info/display_page.asp?se...">Samsung Player
Aquila76 - Saturday, January 7, 2006 - link
The index seems to be a page ahead (clicking on Page 16 brings up Page 17)