The Revo R3600 features an Intel Atom N230 1.6GHz, 1GB RAM (I’ve upgraded to 2) and a 160GB SATA drive with the latest NVidia ION chipset. It’s perfect as a discrete media centre box.
Gizmodo did a review here: http://i.gizmodo.com/5204432/acer-revo-and-nvidia-ion-hands-on-flawless-blu+ray-playback-changes-cheap-computers-forever
I’ve been itching to try XBMC for a long time and this was the perfect machine to try it on. I decided to use the Ubuntu 9.04 mini installation rather than go for XBMC’s own installer.
I downloaded and installed the 32bit version and burnt it to CD. The Revo doesn’t come with a CD/DVD drive so I used an external USB DVD drive. I just did a standard install, the only thing of note was I trashed the recovery partition and the mini RevoBoot partition. I’ll never need them. Oh, and I also had to turn off RevoBoot in the BIOS and make sure the on board graphics chip had 512MB assigned to it rather than the default 256MB of shared system memory.
Once Ubuntu was installed it was time to install and configure XBMC.
Rather than go through the entire installation process manually, I found this automated installation script on www.xbmc.org. Cyberpark has done an awesome job of documenting everything and makes the whole setup simple. Read it here: http://www.xbmc.org/forum/showthread.php?t=55282 and download it from here: http://www.virtualdanny.net/downloads/setupXBMC.sh
Once that was done it automatically rebooted and came back up into XBMC. From downloading the ubuntu iso to the script completion took approximately 30 minutes. Impressive!
There are a few changes that need to be made in XBMC itself in order to enable hardware video acceleration, HDMI audio and menu sounds.
To enable Video Hardware Acceleration in XBMC, navigate to ‘Settings > Video > Players.
Change ‘Render Method’ to VDPAU.
To enable HDMI audio navigate to Settings > System > Audio Hardware.
‘Audio Output’ should be set to Digital.
‘Default Audio Device’ should say ‘HDMI‘ (type this in manually)
‘Passthrough Audio Device’ should say ‘HDMI‘ (again, type this with your keyboard)
‘Downmix to Stereo’ I chose ‘Yes‘ (Depends on your audio hardware)
Currently it’s only connected to my TV so I chose to disable Dolby and DTS as my TV cannot decode those. Eventually I will turn these back on when I connect it to my Home Cinema.
Turn enable menu sounds Press <CTRL> + <ALT> + F2 to get to a console. Log in as the XBMC user. Once there type the following:
vi .asoundrc
Press I to switch to INSERT mode and type the following:
pcm.!default {
type plug
slave {
pcm "hdmi"
}
}
Press ESC and :wq. Now reboot. Upon restart everything should now work.
I tested it with some MKV’s I had and they all worked fine. AVI’s also worked fine. The only problem I had was with HD-WMV’s which use the WMV3 and WMV-Pro audio/video codecs. The video plays fine except every now and then the audio goes out of sync with the video. Quite annoying and I’ve not figured out how to fix this yet rather than not play HD-WMV’s.
To make my MS Media Centre remote work it was simply a case of installing the lirc package and choosing the correct device during the installation.
After this it was time to make the wireless NIC work.
Issue the following command to install the required packages:
sudo apt-get install wireless-tools wpasupplicant iw
There’s a decent guide on how to configure wireless networking here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=202834
I followed that guide and pasted in my config into /etc/network/interfaces
After a reboot, I now had wireless networking and a complete Media Centre which is small enough to hide behind the TV or even mount to the TV if your not using the VESA mounts on the back to wall mount it. For £180 what more could you ask for?
I purchased mine from E-Buyer: http://www.ebuyer.com/product/161260
Next, I’ll be installing the beautiful Aeon skins http://www.aeonproject.com/gallery.html and possibly enabling the SVN repositories and testing the latest XBMC builds.
There’s a nice YouTube video showing the Aeon skins on the Revo here: XBMC on The Acer Revo