Any experience with the ARM based development platforms

I know this topic might not totally fit here - but sitll I thought it would be a good idea to check if any one had any such experience.

I'm planning to get an ARM based development platform, customizing and running a linux based platform for some specific application - say ATSC tuner based STB and record or something like that.

I'm intending to port one of those distros like XBMC, MythTV, etc.

I want to choose an ARM development board for this project which is available at a reasonable price around or under $200... I'm looking to use an ARM Cortex A8 or A9 based SoC.

I came across these:
Beagleboard
Pandaboard
Hawkboard
Trim Slice Pro
Efika MX

Any one ever used one of these - can share their experiences ?

I've right now decided upon Trim Slice Pro because of the available features and the advanced hardware coupled with an attractive price for the opensource development.

One thing though I noticed is none of them have a dedicated SATA controller and HDMi together. Trim Slice Pro uses an USB-SATA adapter for interfacing with an SSD but most of these are pretty slow afaik :| If you know something which can address these issues I'm willing to switch over to that as well.

 

i dont know about the dev myself but i know XBMC has a dev git setup with an ARM version, although it is still experimental and HW acceleration of video is not all the way there, cant do 1080p on most dev boards.

The MythTV wiki has a guide for ARM compiling but i have no idea how well it works.

the Trim Slice is tegra 2 which uses OpenMUX (i think thats the one) for HW acceleration, XBMC does not have support yet but they are working on it.

I have been doing a lot of research my self on this as i would love to have a little HTPC like the trim slice

as for the SSD i dont know how fast it would be, could just use the mirco SD like an android setup, but again dont know how well it would work :\

 

Yes right now the Trim Slice's SSD produces 10 MB/s write access times which might still be good enough for recording 2 HD programs from ATSC OTA tuners - I was only concerned about this

Yeah the HW accelerated decoding on the Tegra platforms (at least Trim Slice) is not yet supported in the current drivers - it is expected quite some time soon...

 

to get around the SSD lack of speed i would drop down one level and use a sd/micro sd card 16 or 32 gb ones, and the use a backend server say mythtv and mysql and just use xbmc as a front end, but thats just me

all you would have to do is get ubuntu and xbmc to cut back in the amount they write to the SD so as not to wear it out to fast.