Media Center Project II

The Acer Revo arrived and it is cute. It sits on a little stand and is less than 2" thick but packed with ports. We fired it up and the installed OS is freeDOS!  That's ok, it was supposed to ship with Windows which we were going to wipe anyway. I was just thinking that i've purchased 5 windows licenses in the last year when i bought computers and i use none of them. Sales figures are not the same as 'in use' figures.


As a bonus it shipped with the wireless keyboard and mouse, i'll take that anyday over a version of windows. The included hard disk is SATA but small - 160gig and there is only 1 gig of ram and the usual Atom cpu. I have read that microsoft forces manufactures to adhere to those low end specs if they want to sell windows. Not a problem for this application, as a media center client it only needs an OS and the client software, in fact i could take out the hd and run it from a usb stick. All the audio/video/picture files are stored on the media server (\\megatron). The revo has a wired ethernet port which is ok because we want high speed to the living room. Other media clients can use wireless - we should install the xbmc client on the laptops and liam's iMac. That means all the computers can access the content files which are stored centrally.

We popped open the machine by removing 1 screw and squeezing the side panel. The inside is neat. Added a second 1gig sodimm to bring it up to 2 gig. This is necessary as the video uses the ram, like a cheap laptop it has no dedicated video ram. A setting in the BIOS controls the amount of ram allocated to the nvidia ion chip - we set it to 512mb as we want to output high def video (and sound) via HDMI.

Anyway, we hooked up a usb optical drive, went into the BIOS and changed the 1st boot device to USB and rebooted into an XBMC liveCD. We wiped the hard disk clean and installed - it puts a stripped down version of ubuntu 9.10 with the nvidia ion drivers and the xbmc client on the disk. The internal HD is easy to remove if you want a larger drive, but for heat reasons i would use the eSata connector.

The install and configuration of XBMC was a breeze, the network and all devices were picked up. I plugged in the little dongle for the wireless and the keyboard/mouse were recognized. The network speed was fine, i could browse windows shares (uck) and it picked up the UpnP media server no problem. The skin is incredible, very nice look. Then i plugged in the Vista media center remote and rebooted, it picked it up and worked like a charm. Able to perform all functions, including turning off the unit from the remote. Set up the audio/video settings to 1080i with hdmi sound out and shut down the machine. For setup and testing it was hooked to a 24" LCD via a vga cable.

Then we moved the unit upstairs and plugged it into the Onkyo Integta 9.8 pre-amp. This should route the video and audio to the pre-amp so that any desired video or audio processing takes place in the digital domain and direct the video out via hdmi to the 54" Panasonic and the audio via XLR cables to the power amps and then to the speakers.

This is where we hit the first problem occurred. At boot time the text was shown but with red streaking dashed lines all over the screen and after the XBMC logo appeared the screen went blank and the pre-amp displayed 'no video signal'. So i tried hooking it directly to the Panasonic and no signal at all. It was if the two devices were not syncing the video signal. I hauled up a vga monitor and changed the resolutions - cycling though 480i,480p,720p etc without joy. So off to searching the internet for answers. It seems there are a number of issues with using the liveCD and with HDMI audio/video under Ubunutu/XBMC. Some people appeared to have them solved but there are different approaches and no clear cut answer. This means some trial and error - which will take time. The unit will have to be returned to the basement for more tests.

The other issue is around the updating of the liveCD - once installed, updating is not clear to me. It can be done but again would require research and trial and error. I am thinking a better option would be to just go ahead and install 9.10 on the box along with the XBMC client repositories. This way i get the updates automatically. Plus, i can set it to auto boot the xbmc client anyway. Looks like i need some time...

Finally, i went with xbmc instead of mythTV because i don't have cable or satellite. However, i did install a small, cheap HDTV antenna in the attic and ran coax cable down to the Panasonic which has an HD tuner. I get one channel (SUN TV) over the air. The quality is fantastic. This makes me think that next year when analog over the air TV is finally gone that their would be more OTA high def signals. At that point it would make sense to purchase a tv-tuner card for the media server. The card would have to be supported by linux but once that is installed and setup then any of the clients could get TV as well as being able to record shows (as if there was anything on....)