Shane McGlaun29 July 2009, 9:56 PM
Acer Aspire One netbook gets unofficial HD video support from hackers.
I'll get this out in the open right at the start; I fail to see a real use for HD capability in most netbooks. The average 10.1-inch netbook lacks enough screen resolution to be able to show HD video, so having the hardware to decode HD video in 1080p or even 720p is a moot point.
The only thing that it would be good for is a user who likes to stream HD video from their netbook to a big screen in the living room -- and I can certainly see the use for this assuming you have an HDMI out or another way to get the video to your big screen in HD.
Compared to the wealth of netbooks on the market, very few of them actually support HD video decoding. NVIDIA Ion-powered netbooks are still as rare as a conservative that likes Barack Obama. Ion isn’t the only game in town when it comes to offloading the intense processing that goes along with HD video decoding form the CPU of a netbook. Broadcom has a mini PCI-e card called the BCM70012 that can handle up to 1080p HD decoding.
The catch is that there are only a few machines with the Broadcom card as an option. Some guys over at Terracode have taken an off the shelf Acer Aspire One and
hacked the little rig to use the Broadcom card and a 64GB SSD all in a tiny 8.9-inch netbook. The little machine even supports 1920 x 1080 resolution video from the VGA output. The entire project including the netbook cost about $US442 ($AUD536).