Playing DVDs on the AmigaONE 500

DvPlayer

I finally managed to play a DVD on an Amiga! So what?

Well, I bought DvPlayer, a video player for playing back DVDs amongst other formats, two years back and never successfully played a DVD with it on my Sam440flex. This all changed on Friday.

Battle of the Radeons

In the search for a suitable Radeon HD card for my new AmigaONE 500 I hunted for some of the recommended cards on eBay and found there were many to choose from. However, I soon discovered many Radeon HD cards are double height and although these might work they are not practical in the AmigaONE 500 as below the PCIe slot is the motherboard's one PCI slot occupied by a SATA board. Despite this I found a good selection of single height cards and ended up the winning bidder on two cards:

Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 5450 1 GB

XFX ATI Radeon HD 5550 1GB

Assist 1.6

Assist 1.6 is now available to download from OS4Depot.

The main feature of this release are dependency checkers for applications requiring AmiCygnix or Qt. Apart from this there are some other small improvements, such as page numbers in the A to Z, and 40 new articles taking the total number to over 500 now!

New users can download Assist from OS4Depot, while existing users can update to the latest release via AmiUpdate.

First Impressions

A couple of months back I received an email from amigakit inviting me to to order an AmigaONE X1000. I had registered interest in the X1000 some time before and joined the queue for this flagship AmigaOS system. I was disappointed to discover the price had crept up, due to rising CPU prices, with the configuration I wanted now coming in at almost £2300. To be honest I think the long wait also took the shine off the prospect of an X1000 for me. Eventually I contacted amigakit to let them know I was going to pass on the offer and instead decided to take a second look at ACube's AmigaONE 500.

The AmigaONE 500 is a system based on ACube's Sam460ex motherboard. I already have a Sam440flex which I have had a lot of use out of over the last few years, but fancied an upgrade. I decided to order the AmigaONE 500 SSD edition which came in at less than half the price of the X1000. Although not as powerful as an X1000, and perhaps less 'future proof', the difference in cost ultimately swung the decision for me.