Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/830466
It's a Small, Small World Big Media in a Small Package When I started looking at some of the new small PCs to host some of the video play- back software tools I have written over the last two decades or so, I discovered a large number of choices from various manufacturers that were quite capable and surprisingly, small and inexpensive. Many in the film and TV business have been stuck in the walled garden of Apple for so long, they haven't ventured out- side to see what is available to run some of the tools available or necessary to do our work. For on-screen video playback, most people are using the only small option available from Apple, the Mac Mini, which is overpriced and whose case is carved from a solid block of aluminum making it problematic to hide behind a display (no, gaffer tape won't hold them). Besides video playback, many Production Sound Mixers are running a Mac Mini on their cart using BoomRecorder or Gallery Metacorder as a primary recording tool. They may have the need every now and then to run some utilities for Venue control or mixer configuration or sound file editing or conversion. A solution in the past has been to just install Windows on the Mac under Bootcamp or using Parallels, VR Fusion or some other virtual machine software. Well, that comes at a cost. A standalone license of Windows costs more than $100 and the virtual machine software another $79 or so and of course, if there is a hardware failure of the Mac, you lose both systems. Also, the Apple Bootcamp drivers and the virtual machine drivers are not very good and most don't support hardware acceleration for video decoding. There is a solution that can be cheaper and more versatile, and that is a separate mini-Windows PC and a HDMI/USB KVM switch. Intel started things off in the tiny PC market with their NUC (New Unit of Computing), which were small reference designs of single-board computers about the size of a two- inch stack of CDs and about forty percent smaller than the Mac Mini. Then they introduced the first Stick PC that con- tained a full PC in a package about the size of a double pack of gum or a bloated USB thumb drive. Many of these are small enough to be stuck to the back of your monitor and are light enough (only 1.5 to 2.7 ounces) to support their own weight off the built-in HDMI connector. Some are completely fan- less, so they make a good way to turn any HDTV or monitor into a full PC, which can be used on a soundstage or record- ing studio without having to worry about additional noise. My use however, was for video playback on set, and I made some amazing discoveries in these small PCs. They are very capable of playing back HD (H.264 encoded) video. Specifically, I found that the units based on the Intel Bay Trail quad core Atom Z3735F chipset like the Azulle Quantum Access Stick PC and the original Intel Stick PC were even able to decode and play back up to nine HD video files simultaneously at full frame rate. This is very useful for simulating security video consoles or TV studio multiview displays. Although they are tiny, they are full Windows 8.1 or Windows 10 computers and will run any software that will run on your average Windows desktop. They support ten- point touch screens and have built-in WiFi 802.11 a/b/n and Bluetooth 4. The most common configuration for these Atom SoC (System on Chip)-based machines is 2GB of RAM and by Courtney M. Goodin