Acer Aspire Revo XBMC HTPC


Rajahal

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Worth bearing in mind you can run xbmc live direct from the CD so you can avoid zapping your hard disk straight away if you so choose. You won't have a persistent library without some tinkering though.

Thanks for the tip, but I don't see any point in doing that.  Even if I do decide to go with a full OS in the future, it will be either Win7 or some version of Linux, there's no way I'm keeping WinXP on there.

 

My only worry at this point is running into this problem.

 

;D yep fair point - just checking you knew it was an option in case you suddenly remembered how much you loved XP and got upset :)

 

I'm not sure on the issue linked from that thread.

 

I have seen playback fall out since upgrading *but* it happens when unraid is busy (parity check, lots of torrents going, mover script firing) so I can't rule out unraid failing to respond for a split second. XBMC playback buffer has always been close to 0 (Is that tuneable?) and it could be more sensitive in camelot.

 

Saying that I *cannot* reproduce the problem at will and recently (since my unraid box has been quieter) I have not had any drops outs in a week or so's worth of hardcore soprano's and movie watching :)

 

So there *might* be an issue but I personally wouldn't like to pin it on XBMC or the samba implementation (this may also depend on the samba libs installed rather than xbmc?) just yet. Don't worry too much about it..yet!

 

 

 

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I'm forced to use XP at work (gov't job)....I loathe it.  The lack of quick search alone kills it.  However, I still have one friend who insists on using XP for his HTPC.  He hated Vista so much (after I suggested that he try it) that he won't even consider using Win7, even though I've told him how much better and faster it is, compared to XP.  Maybe if I bring up the Directx 10 issue he'll reconsider...since he's been griping about poor 1080p playback.  More likely, he'll see my sweet Revo/XBMC set up and want his own :D

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I'm forced to use XP at work (gov't job)....I loathe it.  The lack of quick search alone kills it.  However, I still have one friend who insists on using XP for his HTPC.  He hated Vista so much (after I suggested that he try it) that he won't even consider using Win7, even though I've told him how much better and faster it is, compared to XP.  Maybe if I bring up the Directx 10 issue he'll reconsider...since he's been griping about poor 1080p playback.  More likely, he'll see my sweet Revo/XBMC set up and want his own :D

 

Definately the latter. Quite a few people I know have gone the same route as you and I have taken after seeing / quizzing me on mine.

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FWIW, you can run XBMC off a flash drive too.

 

I used the XBMC Live CD to install to a SSD.

I believe you can install XBMC via the Live cd right to the USB flash drive, although I have not tried it.  I believe 4GB is the min size and I do not have one to test with.

 

I think you may need to adjust the /etc/fstab to mount with noatime and nodiratime.

 

Currently I'm running XBMC on the ASROCK off a 30GB SSD. Without any music on it, it took 1GB.

 

20 seconds from power on to XBMC user interface.

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2) A one-click DVD ripping app using my external USB DVD drive (DVDShrink or similar)

3) One-click DVD to x264 encoding (Handbrake or similar)

4) #'s 2 and 3 rolled into a single one-click app (with option of full DVD dump or encode)

 

Is there such a program in Linux? I would love to migrate my windows ripping machine to a linux machine.

Right now I use a VMware XP host to do the rips.

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2) A one-click DVD ripping app using my external USB DVD drive (DVDShrink or similar)

3) One-click DVD to x264 encoding (Handbrake or similar)

4) #'s 2 and 3 rolled into a single one-click app (with option of full DVD dump or encode)

 

Is there such a program in Linux? I would love to migrate my windows ripping machine to a linux machine.

Right now I use a VMware XP host to do the rips.

 

I do the exact same thing on my Mac (A VMWare Fusion XP machine with AnyDVD and CloneDVD2).  It works well enough but I have to do it on my laptop which is not ideal.

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It hath arrived!  Went home at lunch and started playing with it.  It is sexy small, and the included keyboard and mouse are far better than I expected (well, the keyboard is at least)!  I probably still won't use them, but still - I expected crap.  It booted into the pre-installed WinXP just fine, and I did have a good lol at the bloatware.  I noticed WinXP looked like crap on my HDTV - the background was fine, but the text was jagged and hard to read.  It did detect the correct video settings though, at least as far as the screen size is concerned (720p).  I'm not too concerned with this, considering that I'll be wiping WinXP off of it in just a few hours time.  I started downloading XBMC Live Camelot to my desktop, so it should be done by the time I get home after work tonight.

 

Now I have to kill time at work for another 5 hours until I can go home....guess I'll get REAL familiar with that Lifehacker article.

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FWIW, you can run XBMC off a flash drive too.

 

I used the XBMC Live CD to install to a SSD.

I believe you can install XBMC via the Live cd right to the USB flash drive, although I have not tried it.  I believe 4GB is the min size and I do not have one to test with.

 

I think you may need to adjust the /etc/fstab to mount with noatime and nodiratime.

 

Currently I'm running XBMC on the ASROCK off a 30GB SSD. Without any music on it, it took 1GB.

 

20 seconds from power on to XBMC user interface.

 

Sometime in the future I may stick an SSD into my Revo, but for now I don't want to sink any more money into it.  However, interestingly enough, over at the XBMC forums someone did a comparison of running XBMC Live from the pre-installed 160 GB HDD (not SSD), a USB Flash drive, and an SD card.  They reported that the HDD install had the fastest boot times by far.  Therefore, for now at least I'll be sticking with the standard HDD install.

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The library mode is the real USB killer. Cached thumbnails can quickly consume multi GB space and multi 100k file counts (especailly for people like us with huge NAS arrays of media). B very definition this is the bit you want to be nippy. 20 more seconds boot time sucks but they pale when compared to lagging menus and long library loads.

 

SSD excels at this but the cost is still prohibitive IMHO.

 

Edit: and to comment on earlier as well.... XBMC is primarily developed for Linux. It gets everything first and fixed first with the most devs et al. If you want a dedicated XBMC machine then umpteen bucks for an OS that is slower, fatter, does not support GPU acceleration yet and many other things seems silly.... Linux is the way forward. This is especially true when using off the shelf hardware which has already been tested to death by users. I wont reinvent the wheel here the forums will show you the light. So pay M$ the money for this pay it to team XBMC instead if you really want to spend cash. Hell buy 2 Revos it would almost be the same money

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The library mode is the real USB killer. Cached thumbnails can quickly consume multi GB space and multi 100k file counts (especailly for people like us with huge NAS arrays of media). B very definition this is the bit you want to be nippy. 20 more seconds boot time sucks but they pale when compared to lagging menus and long library loads.

 

SSD excels at this but the cost is still prohibitive IMHO.

 

I only suggested the USB flash possibility for people who wanted to try it without altering/wiping an existing setup.

 

I've seen 30GB ssds for $65 with free shipping.

 

For me the SSD load time had me giggling. I hardly ever used the popcorn hour because of the load time and laggy interface. I also disliked only seeing a small window of my media vs what I'm used to with other media players.

 

My goal was very high speed bootup, fast menus and accessibility, quiet enough to be "running" in a bedroom in the dead of night.

 

How much space does one need for library mode in XBMC?

I have not used library mode yet.

I've been using filemode, which is really what I wanted. I really have no idea on this one.

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Oh don't get me wrong USB works and it works well in Linux with XBMC just when you start accumulating library files you lose the snap of an otherwise elegant solution and GUI.

 

Library mode is pretty efficient but if you take say one TV season for example:

 

1 Fanart

1 Poster

22 thumbnails

 

then add on perhaps 30 actor thumbs if you enable it you can see how quickly the filecount can increase. This gets much heavier if you add music to your library since people tend to have silly amounts of mp3s

 

Even if you go OTT with library mode your not going to get past 4-8GB but its the filecount thats the problem. Its helped by the fact thumbs are stored and accessed via a hash of the path of the media file they represent but no matter what USB + 100k thumbs = your bottleneck.

 

YMMV. A recent bug fix increased the library load time for me by 10 fold.

 

On a final note though XBMC in library mode really does push it over the bar against other lesser solutions and is WELL worth the effort learning

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First impressions: very impressed  ;D

 

Some unorganized thoughts:

The entire process (wiping XP, installing XBMC Live, configuring unRAID shares) took less than an hour.  The Revo's power button is a bit deceiving - you have to push it near the bottom, not on the lit up logo as I assumed (I thought it was broken for a minute).  The XBMC Live/ubuntu installation was very straightforward and easy, I dare say even easier than Windows installations (easier than XP, at least).  XBMC does lock up and hang (for what seems like several minutes sometimes) when waiting for unRAID to respond to its requests.  My MCE remote worked fully and perfectly from the start, no configuration needed.  It even works better than it did with my Windows version of XBMC, since the 'Windows Media Center' button now takes you back to the XBMC home screen, and you can type in letters by pressing the number keys multiple times (like texting on a cell phone), which is very useful for quickly searching through my massive lists of media.  720p video plays smoothly.  Camera card (8 GB SDHC) is immediately recognized and shows up appropriately under 'Pictures'.  Pressing the center button on the remote rotates the pictures - very cool.

 

Boot to XBMC main screen in 37 seconds.  Runs at 24 W (idle, as well as playing 720p).

 

Problems thus far: I am unable to FTP into the Revo (I would like to change the skin).  I assume this is because I don't have the correct IP address, but I don't know how to find it.  I tried this tool, but it only displayed the IPs for my desktop, laptop, and unRAID server - it didn't seem to recognize the Revo.

 

Also, XBMC is not recognizing my 'Documentaries' share on my unRAID server.  I can't figure out why, since it sees all the other shares and connects to them no problem.  As far as I know, there is nothing different or unique about the 'Documentaries' share.  Any ideas?

 

It also makes a very loud sound sometimes when I first start a movie or song.  This may be a result of my audio set up - HDMI audio out through the Revo to the TV, then the TV passes the stereo audio out to my computer speakers (Creative 5.1).  I remember experiencing this same thing before when I had a previous HTPC pass audio through the TV in the same manner - every time the HTPC would go to sleep and cut its video output to the TV, the same sound would come out of the speakers (and again when I woke the HTPC back up).  I expect this problem could be solved by a direct audio output from the Revo to the speakers using the headphone jack - not quite as tidy, but certainly doable.  This will all be a non-issue when I eventually buy myself a proper HDMI-compatible surround sound system.

 

The Revo has frozen a few times to the point where I feel compelled to hard-reset it.  Such as while attempting to take a screenshot of a 720p movie while playing said movie....yeah, it didn't like that very much.  At another point I was scrubbing through a TV show (fast forwarding at 32x) and XBMC simply quit out to the shell login screen.

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Running out the door so have to be brief:

 

XBMC doesnt have a ftp server. The old XBOX did but Live doesnt. Install any Linux one:)

 

Getting teh IP is easy. In Confluence skin (the default) scroll to system, then to system info.

 

Turn on debug logging in XBMC then try to replicate your problems. Often the issue will rpesent itself clearly in there

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Problems thus far: I am unable to FTP into the Revo (I would like to change the skin).  I assume this is because I don't have the correct IP address, but I don't know how to find it.

 

You can use the dpkg tools you to pull in packages you want to add such as ftp server or samba server.

If you login to xbmc with the user & password you can do an ifconfig.

The ip addres is also visible in the gui from the system information screen.

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Thanks for the FTP tips, I'll try those when I get home.

 

Another odd thing I noticed: I have four (yes, 4) different encodes of The Dark Knight that I use to test various systems' playback capabilities.  These encodes are: DVDRip (2CD), 576p, 720p, and 1080p.  My TV is only 720p, so that's all I really care about, and I have already proven to myself that the Revo is capable of this.  Still, out of curiosity I decided to try playing the 1080p Dark Knight on the Revo to see if it would hack it...only, it was gone!  My 'movie' share from my unRAID server appears to be incomplete!  At a glace it seems to be all there, but when searching for this particular movie I could only find one of the four versions, the DVDRip.  I then started looking for other missing movies.  I noticed the 'T' section jumped directly to 'U', effectively skipping 10 or so movies.  I scrolled around a bit and then looked at that section again and the missing movies had appeared (though still no Dark Knights).  Perhaps the list is taking a while to fully load?  Is there anyway to make it preload it?  I imagine this is what Library mode does, but I haven't looked into it yet.

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Thanks for the FTP tips, I'll try those when I get home.

 

Another odd thing I noticed: I have four (yes, 4) different encodes of The Dark Knight that I use to test various systems' playback capabilities.  These encodes are: DVDRip (2CD), 576p, 720p, and 1080p.  My TV is only 720p, so that's all I really care about, and I have already proven to myself that the Revo is capable of this.  Still, out of curiosity I decided to try playing the 1080p Dark Knight on the Revo to see if it would hack it...only, it was gone!  My 'movie' share from my unRAID server appears to be incomplete!  At a glace it seems to be all there, but when searching for this particular movie I could only find one of the four versions, the DVDRip.  I then started looking for other missing movies.  I noticed the 'T' section jumped directly to 'U', effectively skipping 10 or so movies.  I scrolled around a bit and then looked at that section again and the missing movies had appeared (though still no Dark Knights).  Perhaps the list is taking a while to fully load?  Is there anyway to make it preload it?  I imagine this is what Library mode does, but I haven't looked into it yet.

 

Are you using the cache dirs script / are the movies in question on different disks? could be a delay in building the listing whilst the disks are spinning up.

 

Library mode does alleviate this as it looks up a local (to your revo) database for movie info after running perioic updates to scan for new content. Once its in the library its there until you clear it manually (even if you remove the media file).

 

Library mode has it's own foibles but you have that fun to come :) (it's really not bad)

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Thanks for the FTP tips, I'll try those when I get home.

 

Another odd thing I noticed: I have four (yes, 4) different encodes of The Dark Knight that I use to test various systems' playback capabilities.  These encodes are: DVDRip (2CD), 576p, 720p, and 1080p.  My TV is only 720p, so that's all I really care about, and I have already proven to myself that the Revo is capable of this.  Still, out of curiosity I decided to try playing the 1080p Dark Knight on the Revo to see if it would hack it...only, it was gone!  My 'movie' share from my unRAID server appears to be incomplete!  At a glace it seems to be all there, but when searching for this particular movie I could only find one of the four versions, the DVDRip.  I then started looking for other missing movies.  I noticed the 'T' section jumped directly to 'U', effectively skipping 10 or so movies.  I scrolled around a bit and then looked at that section again and the missing movies had appeared (though still no Dark Knights).  Perhaps the list is taking a while to fully load?  Is there anyway to make it preload it?  I imagine this is what Library mode does, but I haven't looked into it yet.

 

Don't forget that XBMC has an option to sort all movies beginning with The by what is after that word.

For example, The Dark Night could very well be listed as Dark Knight, The.

 

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Thanks joebanana.  I did notice the 'sort without articles' option, and I turned it off (I want The Dark Knight to show up in the 'T's).  It seemed to be working with other 'the' movies.

 

No, I'm not using the cache_dirs script, and yes, the movies are located on several different disks (at least 3).  Waiting for a drive to spin up could account for the problem, but I believe all my drives were spun up.  I'll have to recheck that.  I know I hit 'spin up all drives' when I originally mapped all my unRAID shares to XBMC and they are set to a spin down delay of one hour.  I don't believe an hour had passed when I was trying this, but perhaps I'm wrong there.

 

I'm still confounded as to why my 'Documentaries' share isn't showing up at all in XBMC - it won't even show up for me to map it.

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I know I hit 'spin up all drives' when I....

 

Just a heads up.

 

Check around the forum, I remember someone posting a XBMC script to send commands to a spin control script of mine.

It was designed to allow XBMC to remotely trigger a spin up/spin down.

 

maybe this should be re-engineered to use do the call out to unMenu.

 

I believe there is also a script to send a Wake on Lan packet.

 

I may have to revisit this topic for my own uses.

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All - I notice there are two versions of the Revo out there, the atom 230 version and the atom 330 version.  Are both fully capable of running XBMC with 1080p content, or is everyone using the atom 330 version?  It seems the 230 version is easier to find, but will hold out for 330 if that's a requirement here.  Thanks!

 

Mike

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All - I notice there are two versions of the Revo out there, the atom 230 version and the atom 330 version.  Are both fully capable of running XBMC with 1080p content, or is everyone using the atom 330 version?  It seems the 230 version is easier to find, but will hold out for 330 if that's a requirement here.  Thanks!

 

Mike

 

Some people will tell you that the 230 is just fine for all playback.

 

The truth is, it's a really crippled, single-core atom.

 

Don't bother with the 230, unless your top objective is something really quiet and low-powered.

 

 

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This box will be sitting in my theater room running only xbmc, but i do expect it to play 1080p ripped blu-ray discs.  Given that, if the 230 will do all of this and quieter than the 330 I'd actually prefer that option.  On the other hand, if the 230 will be lacking on some formats, or is barely able to keep up here and may not suffice very soon, i'll go with the 330.  all opinions are welcome here!

 

mike

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If you have odd ball videos that cant be accelertated with the GPU then the 330.

 

Keep in mind though that the XBOX was released in 2001 with a 2-bit 733 MHz, Pentium III and just falls short of 720p playback with no GPU acceleration.

 

In reality library mode and skin selection will play a bigger role.

 

 

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