sitzmar! do what now?

xbmc on acer revo

I finally decided to replace my trusty xbox running xbmc with something capable of HD playback. The acer revo is a very slick little box with the nvidia ION chipset which is now supported by the VDPAU renderer in xmbc. At only $200 this is a pretty darn good deal.

I paired my revo with an additional 1GB of memory, and a generic media center remote w/IR reciever

Setup was incredibly simple, from unboxing to playing glorious 720p content in less than an hour. There are plenty of detailed instructions out there on the web, but I'll recap what I did:

1. download the xbmc-live iso
2. use unetbootin to transfer the iso to an sd card
3. insert sd card, power on, hit F12 to get to boot menu, boot from sd card
4. select install xbmc to local disk
5. set video render to vdpau
6. set both audio outputs to hdmi

There's a single screw on the bottom that you need to undo before you can open up the case. After I installed the additional memory, I went into the bios settings and bumped the iGPU Frame Buffer Size up to 512MB.

Once installed, it takes about 20 seconds from power on before it's ready to go. Not quite as fast as the xbox, but still perfectly acceptable. The new default skin, 'Confluence' is pretty slick. I still haven't figured out how to get at all the old menu's that I was used to with ProjectMayhemIII, but it's still growing on me. The new libraray features are pretty rad, and indexing is sooooo much faster now that I just have it scan for new content at startup. I always hated having to manually tell it to recheck my movies folder.

Video playback is excellent, I threw all the HD content I had at it and didn't notice any slowdowns or stuttering. Finally getting to see the 'Planet Earth' series on the big screen was totally worth it! I definitely need to grab some 1080p content to test out.

I plan to figure out how to get the old xbox remote to work with the new system, it's a much simpler remote and half the buttons on the new one don't do anything anyway!

The one last thing that I may try to do is utilize the empty mini pci-e card slot inside. It seems that I could install a small SSD and take the 160GB drive and use it for something else.

Acer Revo and the Wii are buddies now

Update (Jan 5th): For those of you wondering abou 1080p content, I watched an h264 rip of Star Trek at that resolution, and playback was flawless.