Asus digimatrix

I don't see many postings about the digimatrix. Before buying one I looked
often in the newsgroups to see if someone had some reactions but couldn't
find any. Well here are my findings for those in the same situation.

First the looks: have a look at the pictures. In real life it is just as
elegant.

Then under the hood: a very nice and clean design. There is no extra space
so don't count on adding or replacing components easily. (I found a review
in French on the net with plenty of pictures)

Noise: never heard (if you can talk of hearing in this case) a pc so silent.
There are 2 fans (a general and a cpu) but they don't make more noise than
my VCR.

Audio out: has some interferences. This is not of the highest quality. And
then you come to the only mistake in the design. You probably want to use
digital out - but then you have to open the front to connect the cable, and
gone are the good looks of the device.

S-Video out: you have the choice between NTSC, HDTV and PAL. Be warned, I
cannot find any spec on what PAL output it is and on my (Belgian) television
I get a black and white image. For cable input there is no problem as
several (maybe all) PAL standards are supported to find television channels.

Software (Home Theatre from Intervideo). Very nice looks but a lot of
shortcomings. One of the things I cannot find is to name and order the
channels obtained by autoscanning. I think you need to be in the U.S for
this and then it might be automatic through TitanTV. Same with the radio
stations. And then none of the items (pictures, videos, music) seems to be
handy for any serious library. You just have to scroll through the screens
(that move slowly) and you don't have a lot of sorting options. If you
record something from televion the file just gets a number as filename. I
could probably come up with some other shortcomings, but In short I would
say nice for the eye, but not very practical.

The remote control is complete (including an OS-Start button that is
supposed to work even when powered off. I had to send mine back because
several buttons (such as play) did not work. We'll see the result when I get
it back.