Top side of a BeagleBone Black I've been working a bit with the BeagleBone Black (BBB) , a $45USD single board computer, for the last couple of months. It's capabilities, relative to its cost, are impressive. Several sites have compared the specs of the BBB and the popular Raspberry Pi (RPi) , another powerful and low cost single board computer. You can check out some analysis of the two here . One important difference between the BBB and the RPi is that the BBB lacks a video processing unit (VPU) to accelerate video playback . A video processing unit helps improve video decoding and/or encoding rates by performing some or all of the specialized operations involved in video processing. Without a VPU or other specialized hardware, a system would have to perform the video processing using the system's core processor , likely a general purpose processor, and at a far slower rate. This RPi and BBB comparison picks up on the video decoding capab...