Anyone using an Acer Revo currently?

[pheonixsingh]

I took the plunge yesterday and picked up a R3610, 4GB RAM, 320GB HDD for £250 delivered with Windows 7 from SimplyAcer. I would have been happy with the £190 unit on ebuyer but I wanted a wireless keyboard and mouse, by the time I bought that on top I might as well paid the extra to double the RAM and get a 70GB extra HDD space. Used the money from my 2TB BlackArmor refund to pay for it so should arrive today. Also got a 4GB Class 6 SDHC card to boot XBMC from for £8 delivered at 7dayshop.

Already downloaded XBMC and Aeon skin, will get the last bits together so I am ready to rumble Cheers for the links Spenny.

Couple of tips:

if your using xbmc live make sure you use the image i posted a dew posts up, its got alot of tweaks etc already done so will save you the hassle of doing them yourself.

Make sure you convert all your backdrops to .BMP format, especially for Aeon as its quite resource hungry, also use Aeon Showmix 2.5, the other Aeon variants are quite outdated now.

[Nibb]

You cants....Im getting tempted now!!

[liveseytowers]

Couple of tips:

if your using xbmc live make sure you use the image i posted a dew posts up, its got alot of tweaks etc already done so will save you the hassle of doing them yourself.

Make sure you convert all your backdrops to .BMP format, especially for Aeon as its quite resource hungry, also use Aeon Showmix 2.5, the other Aeon variants are quite outdated now.

I've never heard of Showmix before so just had a quick peek at the website and it looks quite nice. Just downloaded it and will try it out tonight

[pheonixsingh]

I've never heard of Showmix before so just had a quick peek at the website and it looks quite nice. Just downloaded it and will try it out tonight

yea its just a more enhanced version of Aeon really, official development of Aeon by the original creator stopped some while ago.

Also to get the best out of any skin, make sure your media if named correctly, especially TV shows otherwise XBMC will not scrape it properly.

For scraping Movies I would recommend Ember Media Manager, its alot better, it will grab alot more info and will also grab images from the file itself for thumbnails that some skins like Aeon Require.

Heres some video tutorials that I roughly followed when I first setup XBMC:

YouTube- XBMC Pt 1 The Noobs Guide To Creating The Ultimate HTPC
YouTube- XBMC Pt 2 The Noobs Guide To Creating The Ultimate HTPC
YouTube- XBMC Pt 3 The Noobs Guide To Creating The Ultimate HTPC
YouTube- XBMC Pt 4 The Noobs Guide To Creating The Ultimate HTPC

[maltloaf]

mine has arrived !

He's left it running windows 7 ultimate, there doesnt seem to be another install/partition on there, unless im being thick !

Time for a play.

[pheonixsingh]

mine has arrived !

He's left it running windows 7 ultimate, there doesnt seem to be another install/partition on there, unless im being thick !

Time for a play.

yea mate, never had xbmc on it, you can simply reduce the partition size using disk management tools in windows then install xbmc on the new partition.

If you need any help just give me a shout.

[ThE gOg]

also use Aeon Showmix 2.5, the other Aeon variants are quite outdated now.

there's aeon65 and aeon hitched that are bang up to date mate

tbh mate showmix 2.5 is ok but imo they fucked it up after showmix 2.1, their forum is dead ever since they took the development thread off the official xbmc site.

if anyones only going to be using their ion for xbmc only, there's an excellent script on the xbmc site that is really easy to use, it sets evereything up within xbmc specifically for the ions, saving messing about in linux changing settings.

linky

i've used it over the weekend and its the best script/installer i've used by far.

[pheonixsingh]

there's aeon65 and aeon hitched that are bang up to date mate

tbh mate showmix 2.5 is ok but imo they fucked it up after showmix 2.1, their forum is dead ever since they took the development thread off the official xbmc site.

yea I tried aeon65 and the hitched version but I the showmix version ran slightly quicker on my machine so ive stuck with it.

Ive been using Alaska in my bedroom setup and im tempted to switch to that for my main htpc just because is so simple and quick to navigate.

[maltloaf]

yea mate, never had xbmc on it, you can simply reduce the partition size using disk management tools in windows then install xbmc on the new partition.

If you need any help just give me a shout.

just done that and installed the xbmcfreak iso into the space. It's sat playing a SD episode of CSI now from my macbook shared directory.

need to have a play with some hd stuff, also I need to make sure surround is working.

[maltloaf]

found a mkv of the hurt locker on my hard drive. Played it and it played perfectly although no sound. Played around with some settings and set the pass through to IEC958 (which I didn't know was SPDIF) and it all burst into life, 5.1 and all

1080p h264 DTS 5.1 playing without the slightest hint of a stutter... well happy.

Is there any way of turning the revo on remotely ? I've got the wireless keyboard and mouse version.

[pheonixsingh]

found a mkv of the hurt locker on my hard drive. Played it and it played perfectly although no sound. Played around with some settings and set the pass through to IEC958 (which I didn't know was SPDIF) and it all burst into life, 5.1 and all

1080p h264 DTS 5.1 playing without the slightest hint of a stutter... well happy.

Is there any way of turning the revo on remotely ? I've got the wireless keyboard and mouse version.

wake-on-lan? You could use your iphone?
Im pretty sure if you have a remote you can program it to put it to sleep and wake it but I havent configured it.

Also get the XBMC remote app for iphone, it turns your iphone into a remote for your xbmc machine

[maltloaf]

yea im going to pick up one of the iphone remote apps, im assuming the £1.79 is the main one ?

I just thought it a shame that you could shut down or restart the box from the keyboard/mouse but you can't start it from off, sorta like you can with a mac keyboard (on the older models at least)

[TheFincher]

Are you streaming the 1080P stuff or does it have to be off of an installed HDD?

[maltloaf]

mine was streaming from the shared directory on my MacBook, wireless from the macbook to the router and then wired to the revo. Not a stutter in sight

[maltloaf]

been playing with wakeonlan this evening and got it working.

I can wake the revo from my mac and also from a specific wakeonlan app on the iphone, but annoyingly it doesnt seem to work from within the proper xbmc remote app (even though it should...)

anyone had any luck with that ? *** edit *** as soon as I post this, WOL from the iphone app starts working !

couldnt fiddle with any more videos etc tonight as the missus was watching the telly.

cheers,

malty

[liveseytowers]

Anyone else streaming to a Revo wirelessly without any stutters? I always had problems so ended up just using USB drives plugged into the Revo.

[Q-Ball]

if you have any tv epsisodes use "media info plus" to organize it and get scappers etc. there are also a java app called tv renamer if you need to rename tv shows etc.

Im going to have to format my revo soon cos its using windows 7 rc1. would be grateful if you could summarise the steps you did to get a dual boot up and running, and which version of xbmcfreak you used etc - is that a version of xbmc live? how do you get skins etc on there afterwards? can u access the partition from windows or is it all linux based?

[evilsatan]

Im going to have to format my revo soon cos its using windows 7 rc1. would be grateful if you could summarise the steps you did to get a dual boot up and running, and which version of xbmcfreak you used etc - is that a version of xbmc live? how do you get skins etc on there afterwards? can u access the partition from windows or is it all linux based?

Do you intend to have a dualboot on the HDD, or a choice to boot from HDD or SD/memory card? I intend to leave Windows 7 on the HDD as it is for PC use and boot XBMC off a SDcard. I would like an option on boot to choose which to boot from just like on a dual boot system so if anyone can tell me if that's possible?

As for you if you want to dual boot from the HDD you should find you answer here:
[LIVE] How do I dual boot windows 7 with XBMC live? - XBMC Community Forum

From my understanding XBMCfreak is a custom release of XMBClive which is tuned for use with the Nvidia ION chipset.

If you want to launch XBMClive I think you need to boot to it rather than boot windows then run it as an app. Alternatively there is a Windows port of XBMC so you can just install it on windows like any other application.

[Q-Ball]

im thinking dual boot is the way foward - seems like malty has got it nailed and want a similar setup to that!

[evilsatan]

I am looking to boot XBMC from a class 6 SD card because I looked at the benchmarks against a HDD and the transfer rates are consistently higher so the idea was a faster boot time.