Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[sixone]

Hi All,

I have two HTPCs, both Windows 7 based. My main HTPC is located in the room where I do most of my media viewing/listening and is built out with a HT Omega Claro sound card, Ceton 6 PCI card, and 6TB of storage. This is my "media server".

My 2nd HTPC was the first HTPC I built, and was relegated to the family room. It just crapped out after 7-years of service. so it had a good run.

I need to replace this with something that can connect to my main HTPC, and I only need it to get music and media files from the media server plus access the internet. I could go the expensive route and rebuild the guts of my 2nd HTPC, or I could get a LIVA Mini PC http://www.ecs.com.tw/LIVA/. Has anyone had experience with this? It looks like I'll need to buy Windows 8, install JRiver, and then I should be good to go. Total cost will be around $250.

Any thoughts or help would be appreciated. I also did a search and could not turn anything up on this in the forum, so I hope I'm not covering old ground.

[astromo]

I've got one loaded up with Ubuntu and MC for Linux with the plan of running audio on it. All a bit of an experiment but it's running fine far. Actually it's pretty impressive that it works just like a "bigger" one.

I've not played around with it for video. Time limits and also not the intent. I'll see what I can do but I may take some time. Haven't got it working via Tremote into my server Windows HTPC where I record TV.

May not be a fair comment but I opted for Linux because I expect that it has a lower resource overhead when compared with Windows. Makes sense to me to make the most of what little CPU it's got.

[astromo]

I've not played around with it for video. Time limits and also not the intent. I'll see what I can do but I may take some time. Haven't got it working via Tremote into my server Windows HTPC where I record TV.

Yep - quick check - video is playing fine by Tremote over the network using the Liva as the client.

[astromo]

ECS doesn't have a forum but you can find some good user feed back from point of sale website customer reviews, such as Amazon and Newegg.

Running MC for Linux, I get a Benchmark report value of 860.

If you go the Linux path, these blog posts could be worth a read:
http://acquisitionsyndrome.com/2014/07/setting-up-the-liva/
http://samiux.blogspot.com.au/2014/07/howto-ecs-liva-mini-pc-kit-on-ubuntu.html

[bob]

Tested one here.
It works fine for audio.
SD video is just OK, HD isn't likely to work well (it's a bit lacking in the power department).
A bit of a PITA to install since it will only boot uefi.
Ours appears to have broken wifi. There isn't any way to get the card to show up in lspci.

[astromo]

bob, check one of my entries above from samiux for info about getting wifi to work. By his/her reports, it's not the best. The stuff from acquisition syndrome could also have some useful stuff.

Regarding power, I had hassles with a dud cable that caused the unit to turn up its toes during high cpu demand. So, I've learnt that sufficient power in terms of amperage is important.

The info I put together here:
Gigabyte Brix N2807
includes info about a bootloader modification from paperwastage that helped me with the UEFI hassles. Also, using Rufus to set up the install USB in GPT mode helped.

[bob]

bob, check one of my entries above from samiux for info about getting wifi to work. By his/her reports, it's not the best. The stuff from acquisition syndrome could also have some useful stuff.

Regarding power, I had hassles with a dud cable that caused the unit to turn up its toes during high cpu demand. So, I've learnt that sufficient power in terms of amperage is important.

The info I put together here:
Gigabyte Brix N2807
includes info about a bootloader modification from paperwastage that helped me with the UEFI hassles. Also, using Rufus to set up the install USB in GPT mode helped.

Thanks, I did find that wifi link before but the card simply isn't seen at all with lspci so I think it's defective.
I was hoping to find a way to install vanilla debian wheezy on it.
I just used ubuntu after fussing around with rufus, etc because I knew the ubuntu installer worked.
It works fine as an MC audio renderer even with the 64 bit OS install.

One isn't going to be doing any 1080p video playback on it though...

[astromo]

Thanks, I did find that wifi link before but the card simply isn't seen at all with lspci so I think it's defective.

I was thinking that hooking into something like this might work:
http://www.asus.com/au/Networking/WL330NUL/

I've got one for travel. Comes in handy at home sometimes in places where Wi-Fi gets attenuated.

[dmarkovi]

I've been looking at the LIVA mini pc since it went on sale for $110. The only site I could find that actually tested video was anandtech (http://anandtech.com/show/8262/ecs-liva-review-the-nettop-rises-again) which was tested with a n2806 processor instead of the n2807 that it now ships with, but I couldn't find any info showing a big difference between the two.

There is also a review for the gigabyte brix (http://anandtech.com/show/8641/gigabyte-brix-gbbxbt1900-review-a-bay-trail-ucff-pc/5).

I decided to wait and see whats being released in the coming year since I'm not in a rush to buy a mini pc yet. I purchased a cheap windows tablet, Lenovo mix 2 8, to play around with and so far it has played everything off my server using jriver.

[JimH]

Bob found that it would do standard def video pretty well, but that's it.

[dmarkovi]

So I went ahead and bought a Liva PC, was $130 with 64gb so if figured why not buy to play around with. Not to happy with it. It plays TV shows fine, most movies are ok, but moving around isn't as smooth as I want. I tried playing Batman Begins which is 1080p 10bit, it plays fine for about a minute and then goes out of sync, then crashes. CPU is at 100% usage. I don't know how to check GPU usage but I'm wondering if there is a way to offload some workload to the GPU.

Is there anyway to have my server transcode while the liva pc plays a lower quality version of the movie?

[bob]

So I went ahead and bought a Liva PC, was $130 with 64gb so if figured why not buy to play around with. Not to happy with it. It plays TV shows fine, most movies are ok, but moving around isn't as smooth as I want. I tried playing Batman Begins which is 1080p 10bit, it plays fine for about a minute and then goes out of sync, then crashes. CPU is at 100% usage. I don't know how to check GPU usage but I'm wondering if there is a way to offload some workload to the GPU.

Is there anyway to have my server transcode while the liva pc plays a lower quality version of the movie?

You need to have a pretty bleeding version of linux on that one.
I was running ubuntu latest desktop 64 bit version.
It IS running right up against the CPU limitations. I was playing a BD rip of Despicable Me 1080p which worked ok but was maxxing out the CPU.
The GPU is running as well as it can under this scenario. The only other possibility would be for some of the newer ones that handle h264 natively to get a h264 stream but
a) the underlying support for that in linux doesn't exist yet from what I understand
b) a lot of stuff isn't H264.

I'd think you could have your server MC DLNA video set to output MPEG2 High Res and it should play OK.

[dmarkovi]

I'm using windows 10 preview. I've been using windows 10 on devices that aren't crucial to my everyday work and I've been happy with how stable it is so I figured i'd load it on the liva pc instead of win 8.1.

I will try to play with the output setting, I looked at it earlier and there are so many to choose from, need to find one that works best for me.

I'm glad I purchased this as now I have a baseline for specs that I need. I've been googling and there seems to be a few tweaks I can do to improve the situation but I don't think its powerful enough for 10bit in any case.

[bob]

I'm using windows 10 preview. I've been using windows 10 on devices that aren't crucial to my everyday work and I've been happy with how stable it is so I figured i'd load it on the liva pc instead of win 8.1.

I will try to play with the output setting, I looked at it earlier and there are so many to choose from, need to find one that works best for me.

I'm glad I purchased this as now I have a baseline for specs that I need. I've been googling and there seems to be a few tweaks I can do to improve the situation but I don't think its powerful enough for 10bit in any case.

Sorry I thought you were running linux on it.
Supposedly there are some h264 drivers for windows but I think you are right about the lack of power for that format.

[Hendrik]

On Windows H.264 should work on those, as well as MPEG-2 and VC-1.