beblu component Media Center system

The LCD

The LCD that beblu include is programmed to work fully with Media Center. On bootup, you get a splashscreen; sitting in Media Center, you get a 'Welcome' screen. When playing an audio track or a video, the data about the track is read and pushed out to the LCD display. It's a pretty cool piece of software engineering.

Niggles with build quality

Whilst the system clearly looks the business, we did have a couple of minor issues with the chassis itself.

The first problem was that the mesh below the ventilation holes came away from the inside. A quick look at the innards revealed the problem - the glue that held the mesh in place had simply given up the ghost. When we asked beblu about this, they stated that this was a known issue with their initial production run of models that has now been fixed by using a different type of glue, which seems fair enough to us. We're not adverse to using a bit of glue (it has saved us from many a major modding mishap in the past) but it is crucial to get stuff that's strong enough!

The other issue that we encountered was that the touch sensitive switch was jarred from its flush alignment by an especially heavy finger push. In reality, you wouldn't press so hard to switch the machine on, but consumer electronics equipment has to be robust, and this power button didn't pass the test. beblu told us that they had not encountered this problem before, and vowed to investigate.

We're happy that, if these problems are solved, the quality of the system is up there with the best we've seen. Mini-ITX was really designed for this type of application, and it's great to see companies like beblu pushing the boat out on what can be done with the platform.