DIY hobbyist sticks with VIA 3 times in a row

William Wong from 'electronic design' has been building his own multimedia routers for many years. Using MythTV and a variety of VIA solutions, he has been forever improving on his previous designs. First with the VIA VM7700, then the VIA ARTiGO A1100 he is now giving away the secrets to his latest design using the sleek VIA ARTiGO A1200.

"Configuring the A1200 is a relatively easy task since it essentially comes assembled but does not include the memory had disk (Fig. 3). A nice feature of the A1200 is that it has a Compact Flash slot with a retainer. This allows a Compact Flash card to be used as the main disk."

The VIA Magic Box has arrived

Sporting a flashy and catchy title, VIA is offering another product for digital signage. This time the focus is on software combined with VIA hardware. The VIA Magic Box offers a complete plug, customize and play system for digital signage solutions.

"Currently available with the choice of a VIA ARTiGO A1150 or fanless VIA ARTiGO A1200, VIA Magic Box provides full HD support and playback of the most popular video codecs through video decoding hardware acceleration including WMV9, VC1 and H.264, in ultra compact, low power designs. The VIA Magic View content management software has been optimized to provide a user friendly interface to manage digital signage content, layout and scheduling.

VIA Magic Box has been designed as a scalable solution to meet the needs of a wide range of customers and is available in two versions, VIA Magic Box Standalone version designed for stand alone displays and kiosks which does not require a network connection, and VIA Magic Box Server version for control of multiple clients and displays through secure networking."

Key Features:

• User-friendly interface 
• Easy schedule management 
• Supports system reboot and shut down 
• Supports Sleeping mode/wake up function 
• Client status/history review 
• Monitors hardware function 
• Media library management