I've been looking quite some time for a HTPC that is friendly to my living room and plays 1080p at the same time. This seems like an impossible quest. But now there's Asus with its new B204 and B206 EEE boxes (http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=24&l2=165). Now that seems like a perfect candidate for a client HTPC to my media server. But the question is: will the Atom N270 and HD3450 combination play 1080p flawlessly? Can anyone comment on this?

Pascal.

I doubt it would do 1080P. If you look on the specs page it says "MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) bit rate <15Mbps" and I know 1080P clips can hit over 40Mbps. Maybe a good alternative, since it sounds like you already have the content stored on another machine, is a media streamer like a Popcorn Hour A-100 or A-110.

Edit: I need to read a little closer. 15 Mbps is for H264 content. I believe the B204 can handle 1080P just fine.

Yeah, that H.264 footnote is a bit confusing.

Popcorn Hour machines look pretty cool, but I'm really looking for a solution that also supports watching (and recording) DVB-C TV signal remotely. So my options are limited and the best solution thus far seems MediaPortal.

Pascal.

I think it would be just enough. As far as I know MediaPortal supports dxva (accelerating video decoding through the graphics card), so it should when you configure it properly. My 3 Ghz Core 2 has a CPU utilization of 0-2% when playing H264 with dxva. An Atom should be just enough.

Without dxva - no chance though

How so? H264 is becoming the codec of choice for high def content. So, how well your GPU does with it is pretty important. That said it all comes down to where your content is coming from. Stuff you DL off the Internet is not going to be >15 Mbps. Think about it this way: If a 100 minute file is 2GB, that is an average bitrate of ~2.7Mbps. Some of that is audio, of course, but let's ignore that for now. So at an average of 2.7 Mbps, even if your peak bitrate is 5X average you are still under 15Mbps. Now, stuff from a Blu-Ray might well be >15Mbps. Of course if you are ripping from Blu-Ray, you can also re-encode to a format your front-end can easily handle (will take a long time though).