I was wondering why I got tearing with XBMC even though I had enabled vsync and why XBMC was reporting a refresh rate of 50Hz for my screen instead of 75Hz as it should have been. It turns out that NVIDIA’s DynamicTwinView feature reports a fake refresh rate (that of the MetaMode which encompasses all [...]

I promised over a month ago some photos of my custom HTPC, so here they are: The box is running Ubuntu 9.10 (aka Karmic Koala) and XBMC which takes advantage of the ION’s PureVideo capabilities via VDPAU.

Yesterday I received a new motherboard for my HTPC: it’s a Zotac ION C which has a passively cooled Atom N230 CPU and a NVIDIA 9400 GPU which supports hardware-accelerated H.264/VC-1 1080p video with very little CPU usage. It’s so quiet now I will take pictures and post them eventually.