It works really well. Playing a Bluray rip, which is the largest file with the highest bit rate of anything I have here, at about 6GB per hour, full 1080P, it uses about 20% cpu. That seems to be spread evenly across both cores and both hyperthreads. So far I haven't found anything it won't play perfectly, although a friend of mine who got one having seen my one has found it has issues with some DVB-T streams he's recorded.

It seems to be an issue with the front end not correctly identifying the raw stream, as the underlying mplayer will handle it perfectly if manually started.

And yes, it works really well with iplayer. There is a plug-in for it which, after some struggling to get it to install properly due to some slightly broken scripts, does a very good job.

The thing is considerably faster than I would have expected, in fact. It would probably make a very nice desktop machine for someone who wasn't a power-user. The only problem I had was getting 5.1 surround working correctly. When it was fed up the HDMI cable and back out of the TV into the receiver via optical, the center channel disappeared. Connecting the optical out from the foxconn box directly to the receiver fixed it. I suspect it's more a problem with the TV than the PC, although it might be some odd HDMI incompatibility due to differences in supported standards.

pca