XBMC Live on the Acer Revo
Earlier this week I bought an Acer Aspire Revo R3610 to replace my original Xbox based XBMC system which has provided sterling service for the last 7 years.
I’ve been a big fan of the Xbox version of XBMC and its predecessor Xbox Media Player (it was the only reason I bought my Xbox) but it’s getting a bit limited now due to its 733MHz CPU and paltry 64MB RAM.
By contrast the Revo R3610 has a dual core Atom N330 CPU and up to 4GB RAM as well as a NVIDIA GeForce 9400 Ion GPU. As a result XBMC on the Revo is capable of playing full 1080p HD video without problem. It makes a perfect media center; it’s small, low powered and if you have a MCE remote control it will work straight off, just plug the USB receiver in.
I’m currently using the XBMC Live release which is a self contained install built on top of a minimal Ubuntu installation. Installing XBMC Live on the Revo is a breeze:
- Download the Camelot 9.11 repack version of XBMC Live
- Extract the iso from the zip file
- Use unetbootin to create a bootable image on a USB flash drive
- Insert the flash drive in the Revo and turn it on, pressing F12 during boot and selecting the USB drive as the boot device
- At the menu you can select to run straight from the USB drive (option 1) or you can select “Install XBMCLive to disk”
- Once that is done just reboot and it will boot straight into XBMC
You will then want to go into the settings and change the “Render Method” in the video section to VDPAU. This allows XBMC to use the Revo’s NVIDIA Ion GPU for video processing. If you are using HDMI for your audio output you will also need to go to the audio section and change the output to Custom and enter plug:hdmi
It makes a fantastic media center and the Revo R3610 with dual core Atom N330 CPU, 2GB RAM and 250GB HD is currently on offer for £199 at ebuyer which is a great deal.
You may just have convinced me to go down this route. What sort of boot time do you get?
It was sub 30 seconds with the Live version. I’m actually running it on top of Xubuntu 10.04 now with XBMC autostarting and it takes 43 seconds from power on to XBMC being ready for action. More on Xubuntu setup here. I prefer the Xubuntu route as having a full desktop available as well is handy.