Media Center III

This is turning into an epic...

We installed ubuntu 9.10 on the revo and then xbmc and all the goodies. Everything worked perfectly, the mediaplayer skin on the 24 inch lcd was very sweet. Only problem was the remote would not work. Installed and configured lirc and everything else but no joy. I also found out the remote also workd with the xbox - turning on the media center also turned on the xbox!

What to do? This got me interested in the xbox - which had been a throw-in trade item. It was able to browse the windows shares on xp and pick up video, audio and pics in windows-friendly formats. A neat program called connect 360 for osx set up the mac pro to share its itunes library with the xbox. So far so good. To get this to work on the pc i had to install windows media player and set it to share the files. It works but the windows media player keeps crashing.

This led me to windows media center, it has an xbox extender to allow and xbox to connect to it. So i installed the media center 2005 version on the revo. Took a while to download all the revo drivers and set the whole thing up. You have to download an update and the extender from microsoft and then enter a number from your xbox and after a few error messages it found the xbox. From the now xbox client i could run the media center. This seemed good - a nice skin and it picked up the local content. However, it couild play very few formats that are essential to a media center like FLAC and quicktime etc and while the online channels were neat like NPR it could not play any content as it did not support FLASH..so it is useless.

So we are back to square 1 - cant use apple tv as it is proprietary and doesnt support file formats in common use for content, ms media center is worse, and the open source xbmc is the best but would only sync with my lcd and not the big plasma. We could try the standalone players like popcorn etc but really why have so many devices?

The xbox seems to be the best possibility, the wireless controllers work well and are sturdy, the hdmi video/sound is excellent and the gui is ok. The question is how to set up the back end so that all content is served and played. So we need to test out a number of media types, esp flac for audio and videos. If the windows media player stability could be fixed and configured so it plays all types then that is a livable solution but i find it odd in 2010 to have to still deal with all these problems. I had a living room media center 10 years ago, a pc hooked to a zenith professional 29 inch tube tv that had vga input. The best solution would be to run xbmc as a client on the xbox 360 but ms does not allow that..

tomorrow - improve xbox back end

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....)