Kindle Fire owners have been hacking Amazon’s $199 Android 2.3 tablet to install unofficial versions of Android 4.0 since late last year. But while those early builds of Android 4.0 offer most of the feature’s you’d expect, up until now they’ve been based on older Android kernels and have lacked support for features such as hardware graphics acceleration. But xda-developers forum…
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Intel’s next generation Atom processors for netbooks, tablets, and desktops are due out by year’s end, and while the Cedar Trail chips won’t offer much more processing power than today’s Pine Trail chips, it looks like they will offer much better graphics performance. We already knew that the Cedar Trail platform would support 1080p HD video playback and Blu-ray decoding….
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Habey has introduced a new version of its HD video decoder which is even smaller than the HB-VD904 PCIe mini card the company introduced last summer. The new Habey HB-VD920 is a half height PCI Express Mini card which you can add to any netbook, tablet, or desktop computer to enable support for 1080p HD video playback. The HB-VD920 is…
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Netbook, smartphone, and tablet makers love to point out the technology that lets you watch HD video on mobile devices. And sure, it’s handy to be able to copy your HD video collection to your portable device for viewing on the go without spending hours transcoding media files first. But let’s face it: It still seems a bit silly to…
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When the folks at Jolicloud announced that version 1.1 of the company’s Linux-based operating system would add support for 720p HD YouTube video playback and 1080p local HD video playback on a netbook with a dual core Intel Atom N550 processor, plenty of people were skeptical. While we still haven’t seen the 1080p promise turned into reality, Jolicloud has posted…
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Acer is reportedly working on a minor update to the Aspire One AOD255 netbook. According to Macles, the main difference between the AOD255 and the upcoming Acer Aspire One AOD256 will be the inclusion of a Quartics QV1271 media co-processor in the latter model. The Quartics card will go in a mini-PCIe slot, and is designed to support 1080p HD…
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Earlier this year the folks at Boxee started showing off an unusually shaped set-top box designed to run the company’s media center software. I got a chance to check out an early prototype at CES and at the time it was sporting a low power NVIDIA Tegra 2 chip capable of playing 1080p HD video. Flash forward about 9 months…
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Adobe has added support for GPU video decoding to the latest version of Flash Player 10.1 for Mac. That means Mac users no longer have to grab a beta version of Adobe Flash in order to see the benefits of GPU acceleration. The upshot is that Mac users should notice that it takes significantly less CPU power to decode Flash…
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The Broadcom Crystal HD video accelerator is a media coprocessor that adds support for HD video playback on computers with slow processors and graphics cards that normally wouldn’t be able to handle high definition video. A handful of netbooks on the market today ship with the card pre-installed, and hackers have been picking up cheap Broadcom cards from eBay for…
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There’s good news and bad news about that new Acer Aspire One 521 netbook that was introduced the other day. The good news is the folks at Notebook Journal.de have gotten their hands on a demo unit. The bad news is they’ve discovered it has issues playing HD video from YouTube. Standard definition video looks good enough — and so…
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The folks behind the Litl Webbook plan to launch an update that will support Adobe Flash Player 10.1 with hardware video acceleration. In other words, you’ll be able to watch HD Flash video on the Litle Webbook. But the company is also introducing an SDK that will allow developers to write Flash-based channels for the notebook. The Litl Webbook is…
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Most netbooks on the market today have VGA ports, but very few support HDMI output for HD video. That makes sense, since most netbooks struggle with anything higher resolution than 720p. The exception are netbooks with NVIDIA ION graphics processors or Broadcom Crystal HD video accelerators — but those are still the exception, not the rule. That could all change…
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