Is the A20 well fitted for my needs ?

[peij]

Hi everyone,

I am going to make sort of a "super multimedia NAS Cloud box" for my home, and I wanted to be sure if the A20 board was well-fitted for my needs.
Here is what I'd like to do with this :

My A20 board would be hidden behind my TV, connected to it through HDMI.
I'd like to have a 1To 2.5" hard drive on the SATA connector to store my files, and another 1To USB Hard drive for backup purpose.

The board would run with the Debian image, and would run :

• XBMC or other multimedia player for video and music.
  
• a bittorent client to share vacation movies with my family, and linux images with the community.
• a SAMBA or equivalent server to share my files over the LAN.
• a django server to make some tests.
• an IMAP compliant mail server to host my mails and be free from google
• optionnaly an OwnCloud server to be completely free from any online storage service (but my Internet connection is a bit slow, so I don't know if it will be really usable)
• several video games emulators, to play good old games with my family and friends.
• and perhaps some other useful services, but I still don't know exactly what.

With all of those things, I wonder if the A20 is powerful enough to manage everything ?

Also, I would like to be able to control the media player with a remote controller, or over the Wi-Fi, using android and Windows Phone devices as remote controllers. Do you think it is possible ?

For the SATA Hard drive, will any 2.5" hard drive be compatible with the board ? I've got WD Scorpio Black 500Go unused at home, and it would be a great start if it is compatible.

Thank you a lot, and sorry for my english !

[EDIT]
Ok, after some searches, I found that XBMC can't use hardware decoding with the A10 or the A20.
I think I'll seek for other solutions !

Thank you !
[/EDIT]

[rzr]

there are 2 different drivers for GPU the binary and the opensource one :

http://linux-sunxi.org/Mali400


And not to mention you can use android and libhybris too..

[PaceyIV]

I use my board as a server. It's power enough for
- p2p using mldonkey (mldonkey.sourceforge.net). I also use flexget to automatic download my best series.
- sharing file inside the LAN network: 10 MB/s
- music streaming with subsonic (subsonic.org)
- streaming multimedia data to XBox 360 with minidlna (http://sourceforge.net/projects/minidlna/)
- django works well: I use it do download my ebook from calibre library directly from my eReader
- owncloud is quite slow, but works


Now I have to get out.
If you have some problems configuring this services feel free to ask me.

[peij]

Hi,

I've read a lot since the other day, and finally, I decided to separate my media center from my personal server.

So I ordered an A20 for my server (with everything except XBMC) and a RPi which is going to run only XBMC with a specific distrib.

there are 2 different drivers for GPU the binary and the opensource one :

http://linux-sunxi.org/Mali400


And not to mention you can use android and libhybris too..

Yes, I saw it yesterday, but it still seems to be a bit tricky, and for the media center part, I prefer something that works directly "out of the box".

Perhaps I will change my config later but for now, I think this should work really fine.

I use my board as a server. It's power enough for
- p2p using mldonkey (mldonkey.sourceforge.net). I also use flexget to automatic download my best series.
- sharing file inside the LAN network: 10 MB/s
- music streaming with subsonic (subsonic.org)
- streaming multimedia data to XBox 360 with minidlna (http://sourceforge.net/projects/minidlna/)
- django works well: I use it do download my ebook from calibre library directly from my eReader
- owncloud is quite slow, but works


Now I have to get out.
If you have some problems configuring this services feel free to ask me.

Initially, I didn't wanted to buy anything. I have an old Tegra 2 android tablet (ASUS TF101), and I thought I could send video to my TV or my XBox 360 using DLNA. I tried many apps for this, but neither could read correctly my videos (my TV kept telling me that it didn't know the file format, though its meant to read h264 videos embedded in mkv..) so I decided to buy some single boards (I wanted to do this for a long time, but I didn't really have a need for it !).

As the standard distrib for the A20 is debian based, I think I can setup my daemons for myself, but if I experience some issues, I'll come to ask here !

Can't wait to receive my A20 though !

Thank you both for your answers !