Early delivery days rock! I wasn’t supposed to have this delivered until Monday, but it showed up this morning, and I’m very, very excited.
(Comments from Blogger)
2019-04-08 by Cpt Hooke
Fantastic review, I can’t wait to read how it performs as a general desktop solution. I did read the Pi3 desktop post a while a go, I might have to revisit it.
2019-04-08 by Aaron
How about video decompression? Say h265/HEVC 2160p and DTS bitstream out the HDMI port? If the drivers/GPU blocks contain good decoding, this could make for an amazing HTPC/Plex TV client. Pretty cheap, SILENT, and plenty of Compute power to decode video smoothly. Add in that it has real 1Gbit ethernet (can you run a test to confirm?), this is awesome.
2019-04-08 by Russell Graves
I know what h.265/HVEC is, though I don’t think I have any 4k content encoded in it. No clue what a DTS stream is, sorry.
Does Plex Media Player have an ARM client? I guess you could just use the browser - it can Direct Play h.264 content in Chrome without problems. I don’t actually think I have any HEVC content.
As for gigabit, I just set up iperf3 between my office iMac and the Nano, and got about 940Mbit across the link on TCP. Given that everything is connected through a dirt cheap 8 port switch of some variety or other, I’d call it honest gigabit on the Nano. It’s not like the Pi where it’s choked. My Pi 3B+ on the same setup is only pushing 275Mbit across the link.
If there’s a particular configuration you want me to test, I can certainly try it out!
2019-04-08 by Aaron
Bitstreaming, briefly, is sending the raw audio from the video (say, and MKV), and sending it out over HDMI to the receiver for decoding instead of decoding it directly. Bitstream: What It Is and How It Works in Home Theater Audio has expanded basic information. The official specs page says “4K @ 60 (H.264/H.265)”, but nothing about bitstreaming. Should be able to, I imagine, and it’s HDMI 2.0. Do you have a full-up Receiver that will tell you what audio it’s receiving/decoding? And then trying playing back something and specifically (I think you can with VLC?) bitstreaming out, and seeing that your receiver is in the proper mode decoding the audio (if it supports it, that is, of course). I’ll try and lookup what, if any, VLC settings need to be done to output the audio directly instead of decoding on the host.
Good to hear that it’s real Gigabit, although playing media across the network may not be too challenging (30-50 Mbit/s for 4K at most), I still prefer to have as close to full bandwidth available as possible. You never know.
Also found https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/1049706/jetson-nano/can-this-board-use-m-2-ssd-nvme/ thread with some possible solutions to allow a real NVMe SSD to fit into that m.2-E slot.
2019-04-08 by Russell Graves
I don’t have a modern receiver. You can see my TV setup here: https://syonyk.blogspot.com/2018/10/cleaning-up-tv-install-in-wall-cable.html
It’s just a 4k TV with a NUC wall mounted behind it, driving a 4k HDMI signal to the TV. I run audio through a USB optical output that runs down to the speakers (straight from the computer, not via the TV path, so I can run music with the TV off).
We don’t have a particularly impressive “home theater” system, by design - we just don’t watch that much media. This works for our needs.
The NVMe SSD would be nice (and I’ve found other carriers that claim to support it as well), but those carriers are quite expensive - I found one for around $100 that adds NVMe SSD support, and that defeats the whole point of this unit (to me). Beyond a certain point, disk IO isn’t really the limiting factor anymore, and even with a slow USB3, it’s “good enough” that I don’t find it particularly limiting. It blows the pants off random 4k IO on a spinning drives we used a decade ago.
2019-04-14 by dthompson4447
Damn preview, have to type again, grr
For SBC, samsung evo is best, modern “plain” evo may not be as good as older (this is not consistant),
evo+ is usually better, not sure it is same as evoPLUS. 32G is better than 16G
See armbian for more gory details
2019-04-14 by Russell Graves
I assume you’re talking about the Samsung Evo/Evo+ microSD cards here - that’s the only thing that makes sense…
You can get a good microSD card, but they’re still not designed for OS use. Find me one that supports trim and that can run 10+MB/s in 4k random IO. To the best of my knowledge, that simply doesn’t exist, and it makes a huge difference in actual OS performance on a daily basis.
2019-04-15 by dthompson4447
I had typed more before preview ate my comment…
Yes, of course uSD, no uSD has trim, but samsung has the best (by far)
4K numbers. Again, check armbian, much realistic data (search iozone)
Since the jetson has working uhs, a fast uSD may be sufficient
(usually the 50 mhz nibble is the choke point, uhs is 3x (or more) that speed)
2019-05-12 by elrengo
Hi! It´s possible to use as Home Media Player? I´m looking for a single board computer with more than one USB3 and more than 2GB to have a very nice playing of 4K videos and good decoding Atmos and good audio.
2019-05-17 by Russell Graves
I don’t know what software you plan to run on it, but it should handle it decently.
2019-05-17 by elrengo
I would use it with a Kodi inage similar to librelec. I dont wont to use a os provide by nvidia
2019-06-02 by pedro
There is another problem with using uSD for OS storage, wear leveling. Operating systems do a lot of erase/write cycles that can wear out the flash memory. True SSD keep track of erase cycles per block and adapt, on the fly, to increase durability for OS storage.
uSD cards and USB sticks were originally considered inappropriate for this application. In the age of the RasPi this seems to have been forgotten.
On a board like this it would be ideal to have an mSATA slot for a real SSD.
2019-06-03 by Unknown
The only thing lacking for the Jetson Nano is an enclosure. Since the Nano is fully EMC pre-certified saving thousands from your product development budget, it still needs a case. Considering the heat at full load, the last thing you want to add is a fan, so a case that also acts as a heatsink was the missing link. So we developed an enclosure specifically for the Jetson Nano that includes space for a PoE Hat and cameras. Now $99 for the Jetson plus a few extra bits and you have a fully fledged AI at the edge Smart PoE Camera.
https://www.iotamy.com/nano-case
2019-06-05 by Russell Graves
You can get carrier boards that support mSATA slots for SSD - they’re just $200.
2019-09-02 by Unknown
Great review! It seems that all four usb 3 parts are sharing the same bus. Does it mean that they share a bandwidth of 5Gb?
2019-09-04 by Russell Graves
I believe so, yes.