Acer AspireRevo w/XBMC - Page 2

Well, I fooled around a bit with updating the NVIDIA drivers on XP, and tested out playing a straight Blu-ray rip (main movie only, Dolby Digital soundtrack, no subtitles). I used the version of PowerDVD 8 that came with it to play the .m2ts files stored on an external hard drive connected to my office computer (via Firewire). That computer and the Revo are both connected at 100Mbps via ethernet to my router.

PowerDVD 8 doesn't seem to offer detailed info in terms of dropped frames, etc., but playback looked silky smooth to me. Oh, I should note that I don't own a 1080p set (I have a 720p plasma, a 720p LCD projector, and a 720p LCD - technically 1368x768 or something odd like that). I've been using that last display for my testing, but I did set the Revo to a resolution of 1920x1080, just so that I could push it to its limits, and it looked like it worked just fine. I can't figure out how to get PowerDVD to play all of these .m2ts files in the right sequence, though, and it didn't recognize either my MCE remote control, or my Harmony remote (programmed to send out XBox classic remote control codes - this is the one I use with my XBox running XBMC), so this wouldn't work well for day-to-day usage.

Unfortunately, there was another problem with PowerDVD 8: the audio didn't seem quite right. There were times when one "track" of the dialog seemed way too soft. I also installed Media Player Classic with the klite codec pack and tried playing my files through that. That program lets me select "Play DVD..." and choose the entire folder structure, which plays things in the right order. The audio seemed to play fine through that program. Unfortunately, it wouldn't play the files smoothly (a major understatement), and it wouldn't recognize my remotes, either. I'm guessing/wondering if I just don't have the codecs configured correctly, because user CrashX had recommended that I try that app/codec pack, so I was under the impression that it was optimized for the ION GPU.

Anyways, getting back to XBMC...

One stumbling block that I had previously posted about was that I didn't have an external USB drive, so I was asking questions about alternative approaches to installing XBMC. Well, last night I remembered that I had bought one of those external doodads which lets you connect to an internal hard drive's SATA/EIDE connector and the other end of it has a USB connector. I had originally bought it to salvage data off of a drive where the computer had died. I was hoping that maybe it would also work if I connected it to an extra internal DVD-RW drive I had, and the answer is yes.

So, I grabbed the .ISO CD-R image off of the "How-To install XBMC Live on a Revo" thread at XBMC.org. Then my next dilemma...I didn't have any blank CD-Rs, but I did have a bunch of blank DVD-Rs. Could I write the CD-R image onto a DVD-R? Long story short, the answer is yes.

For whatever reason, the Revo's F12 boot menu wasn't showing me the USB-connected DVD-RW drive, though. I tried shutting down, powering back on, hitting F12, and repeated this several times, but no dice. Only the internal hard drive was shown as an option. So then I was worried that my SATA/EIDE doodad wasn't going to work for that, but I figured I'd try one more time. This time booted all the way into Windows XP, selected shut down/restart Windows, then hit F12, and there was my drive. Yea!

Next up, I saw a list of places to install to, but as soon as I hit the down arrow once, it took off and booted up XBMC. The XBMC UI was operational and my XBMC remote control was recognized (but not my Harmony/XBox-classic remote). It seemed to be churning away at the DVD-RW drive, so I don't know if it was maybe doing the install onto that? I ended up shutting down, rebooting into XP (to confirm that it didn't overwrite that partition), and then shut down.

That's where I stand now. Next I'll try to ready a USB stick and see if I can boot up with the DVD-R and install XBMC Live onto that.

Thanks, you just answered my next question. I saw that the How-To and XBMC Live Wiki indicated that you could also install Live to the hard drive, but wasn't clear if it was going to create a new partition or write over my XP partition, and I'm not ready to write over XP (at least not yet).

I do have an 8GB USB stick, but it's got some stuff on it that I'd need to move over. I may just decide to create a new partition, since that's the direction I'd want to go eventually, anyway. How big/small of a partition do you think I should make it (keeping in mind that I'm going to be storing all my media on my "NAS")?

Any recommendations for a free hard disk partitioning app?

I remembered that the Revo actually came with two partitions already. The first one (C: drive) was named "ACER" and the 2nd (D: drive) was named "DATA"). There was nothing on the 2nd one and both were the same size (about 67GB). So I was thinking that I could maybe install this onto that, but when I boot up with the XBMC Live disk, it only reports that I have one option:
1: /dev/sda (156290 MB) - FIXED disk

Any ideas?

OK, I got impatient and decided to copy everything off of my 8GB USB stick so that I could use that. I booted up with the DVD-R again (once again, I found that I had to boot into Windows XP, then restart, then hit F12 in order for the Revo to even see my USB-connected DVD-RW drive).

So it shows me the USB stick as an option, and I select it. Then I see the following...

Copying system files - please wait...
[ 83.569094] end_request: I/O error, dev sr0, sector 2184
[ 83.569167] Buffer I/O error on device sr0, logical block 546
... (the message is repeated several times for several blocks)
Error copying file: initrd0.img - check your media
Installing GRUB...

Then it proceeds to ask me if I want to create a permanent system storage file.

But I don't know if it worked. Were those errors referring to bad blocks on my DVD-R disc, or bad blocks on my USB stick?

In regards to my issue installing to the 2nd partition, I did some more searching on xbmc.org and it looks like the XBMC Live install won't recognize multiple partitions. It only sees the entire hard disk. That's lame.

So as I mentioned previously, I tried installing to the USB key and got several errors, but it proceeded anyway. Then it seemed to take forever creating that 4GB storage space, so I eventually thought it had locked up and went over to shut down the computer. As soon as I hit the power button, the script continued and said that it had finished, but then detected me pressing the power button, so it said it was going to shut down.

Whatever.

So it shut down and I unhooked my USB-connected DVD-RW drive, booted up, hit F12, and selected for it to boot from my USB key. Then I see "Starting up..." and it just hangs there forever.

Meh.

Reading up in that "How-To" thread at xbmc.org, it seems like everyone over there installed to their hard disk, and one other user mentioned getting similar errors as I had gotten when he tried to install to a USB key. He eventually installed to hard disk.

I'm really not ready to completely wipe out my XP partition though. I really want two partitions.

Looks like I may have to go with plan B and install Linux myself. That should be fun.

Update:

I decided to give the install to USB another try. This time I didn't get any of the errors I got the first time and it seems to have worked.

I followed the instructions in the How-To thread at XBMC.org for configuring the HDMI audio, but the user there seemed to be hooking up to a receiver. I was hooking up to my TV, so I needed to switch "digital" to "analog". Playing back my Blu-ray rip, the audio issues I reported earlier (when playing via PowerDVD 8 on XP) seems to be a non-issue thru XBMC, so that's good news.

I initially ran into a problem with choppy/slow video. Then I tried playing a "simple" standard-def DVD rip that plays fine on my XBox and it was choppy, too. It reminded me of a problem a ran into long ago with my XBox with choppy video which was solved by providing a username/password in my sources.xml file. I copied over my XBox's sources.xml file and the problem went away. The Blu-ray rip played fine as well. It reported several dropped frames right away, but that number never increased after watching several minutes of the movie, so it appears to be a bug (?) which only impacts the initial start of a movie.

The picture seemed darker than it ought to be, which I believe is something I've read someone else complain about, but I could probably tweak this just by cranking up my brightness and/or contrast a bit.

One problem (?) I'm not sure how to fix: XBMC defaulted to 1280x720 @ 50Hz. Two things: Isn't 50Hz a non-US standard? The XBox in my living room hooked up to my plasma reports 1280x720 @ 60Hz. On my Revo, 60Hz wasn't an option. Also, I saw no 1080p option, and 1080i didn't fit the screen properly. Under XP, I could select 1920x1080 as a resolution, and my Vizio LCD TV would downscale this to 1376x768 (or whatever it is). Because 768 > 720, I'm losing a few lines of resolution that I'd like to have. Anyone have any ideas on this?

Other concerns: Navigating around the UI is slower than on my XBox. Perhaps this would be solved by upgrading my RAM, but I'd rather not do that unless I knew for certain that it would fix it. The 1GB of RAM seems to be enough to handle my 1080p Blu-ray rip.

Yeah, I've seen your comments about that in regards to the AppleTV. I guess I was expecting better from a more modern computer like the Revo. Has there ever been any formal explanation from the XBMC devs as to why the UI would run so much better on the ancient XBox? motd2k, can you add some insight into this?


Thanks, I'll read up on that.

I've done much searching and can't find the answer to this. Where exactly should the "conf" directory be? In the root of the USB key? I tried that, and had copied down the xorg.conf file that I found in the x11 directory (while running XBMC and FTP'ing into it). I then created the entry for DynamicTwinView. Initially I tried to copy back this updated xorg.conf file via FTP, but it appeared to be "in use" so it wouldn't overwrite it. So I shut the Revo down, pulled out the USB stick, stuck it in my laptop, and then created the "conf" directory in the root of the stick, and copied my updated xorg.conf file into that directory.

But when I put it back in the Revo and booted up, I still didn't see any 1920x1080 @ 60Hz option.

Koadic, thanks for the tips! Last night, after doing much Google searching, I did stumble upon a comment by someone who said that they were able to edit the xorg.conf file by starting up XBMC in Safe mode and using "sudo nano" to edit the text file. I was a bit nervous about screwing something up, but I did that successfully, adding the DynamicTwinView line (but none of the other things you mention - yet). Unfortunately, after rebooting, I still didn't see a 1280x720 @ 60Hz or any 1920x1080 display options in XBMC.

Is it because I'm missing the other mods that you mention? Or might the problem be something else? Again, my LCD display is not fully 1080p capable. It's 1366x768. But I can choose 1080i as an output format on my high-def TiVo and, as I reported previously, I can choose 1920x1080 in XP. I should think that choosing 1080 as my output would be desirable since my LCD TV is capable of a bit more than 720 lines of resolution, so every extra bit of detail would be appreciated.

One other thought: Could it be important to have the flag "False" be capitalized? I entered it as "false" per the examples shown in other threads I had read. I know that UNIX/Linux is case-sensitive with many things, but I don't know if this is one of them.

Anyways, I'll try out some of the other recommendations you mentioned. I already created the .asoundrc file per the How-To thread at XBMC.org that I've mentioned several times.

OK, so I went ahead and followed the rest of your suggestions (with the exception of the Standby mode mod, since I'm not sure yet if I need that). This included upgrading to the latest version of XBMC, which I was certainly nervous about. I received some warnings/errors along the way (when , running "sudo apt-get update"), which I foolishly did not write down. After running "sudo apt-get install xbmc", I saw the following messages which looked like warnings/errors:
Nevertheless, after rebooting, XBMC came up fine. And my video mode was now defaulted to 720p60, which sounded more correct than the 50Hz option I was previously only seeing. Sadly, I still do not see any 1920x1080 options. In fact, the 1080i option that was previously there (but didn't seem to render correctly) is no longer there at all. There are other lower-res modes now available, that weren't there before, and there's also a new "Windowed" option. Again, though, it seems like I should be able to select some sort of 1080 (or perhaps a 1366x768) option, no?

Anyways, I'll probably table that issue for now and just play with XBMC for today.

One usability issue that I do want to solve, though, is how to get my Harmony remote working with this. My Harmony remote is already programmed to transmit codes compatible with the XBox classic remote (it works fine with my classic XBox running XBMC), and I thought that XBMC Live came out of the box working with that. But, currently, it only seems to work with my Windows Media Center remote.

OK, thanks for the confirmation that getting the classic XBox remote isn't as simple of a mod as I was hoping. As you said, I can reprogram my Harmony to transmit Media Center remote codes instead. A bit of a pain, but probably easier than dealing with Linux.

A sad note (perhaps) for those of you anxiously following my progress with the Revo/XBMC...I had been following the WDTV Live thread here (as well as numerous other streamer threads here) and saw mention that some folks had seen the Live on store shelves here and there. Well, I've got a Best Buy about 10 minutes away from my house, and a bunch of Best Buy gift cards people have given me over the years, so I couldn't resist the urge to take a drive over to see if my local Best Buy had any. Turns out they did, so I picked one up. $140 (not on sale, I don't believe).

But the good news is that I'll be able to do some direct comparisons between the two boxes (and compare to the older XBox w/XBMC, for that matter).

I like the lower price and promise of "works out of the box" of the WDTV Live, but I do have an affinity for XBMC, and the UI on my Revo would match up with the other, older XBoxes around the house (for potentially easier usability by my wife and daughter). I can also return the WDTV Live to Best Buy, whereas if I decided that the WDTV Live met my needs better, I'd need to resell the Revo. Should be fun!

Great. Something's hosed.

Earlier today I tweaked my xTV skin so that the "Shutdown" option would perform a Suspend. So I then selected Shutdown, which appeared to put the Revo into Suspend mode (the power light would blink). Later, I point my Media Center remote at it, press the remote's power button, and the Revo appears to wake up. Cool.

...but it never truly revived itself. I can't remember what happened, to be honest with you, but it wasn't returning to XBMC, so I pushed-and-held the power button the Revo and shut it down. I figured that maybe Koadic's hack in regards to the Suspend mode might be necessary, and so I planned to implement that later.

Well, later on comes (a few minutes ago), and I try to power the Revo on. Everything appears normal, but then after I see the big XBMC logo, the screen starts to turn on/off in about one second intervals, like the Revo is sending a signal to my TV over HDMI, and then not sending a signal, etc. I let it do this for a minute and then shut it down again. Try to start up again, and I get the same thing.

So then I go and boot up in Safe mode, and I type "sudo nano /boot/grub/menu.lst" per Koadic's recommendation. But apparently menu.lst doesn't already exist on my Revo. So I close out without adding the line he recommended.

Not sure what to do now. I'm thinking maybe something got corrupted on my USB stick (remember, I did not install Live to my hard drive). Anyone have any ideas?

Well, here's what I just posted in the WDTV Live thread...


I've already packed the WDTV Live back up. I'll check back in on that thread again tomorrow in case someone shows me the "secret handshake" whereby I press a combination of buttons the remote which open up a bunch of display optoins. But I doubt it. The WDTV Live is an amazing piece of technology. Clearly capable of playing back uncompressed Blu-ray 1080p video. And all in a teensy-tiny box. But the UI is absolutely horrid. There's just no way I can work with it.

Meanwhile...I anxiously await help getting my Revo w/XBMC Live working again.

Well, I booted up in Safe mode, FTP'd over, and grabbed my xbmc.log file. Here's what it reports:
.. then misc lines that look normal, then...
Any ideas as to how I can repair this? I can't seem to delete the guisettings.xml file via FTP. I copied it down and looked at it, and after the tag, I see a couple of entries, but no close tag for and that's where the file ends. My next approach will be to try to track down the master guisettings.xml file and manually edit this one to match it.

Right after posting that last message, I attempted to make a simple change to the guisettings.xml file. When I tried to save it, it told me that it was read-only. Then I tried issuing the command "sudo chmod +x /.bootMedia/dotXBMC/userdata/guisettings.xml" but that reported back an error as well.

So, at this point I'm guessing that the some data on the USB stick got corrupted, and I'm reinstalling XBMC Live from scratch back onto that.

For those of you who were interested in my WDTV Live impressions, here are some updates. I just posted the following in the WDTV Live thread...

************

I wanted to follow up with some things I learned since my last "first impressions" post. At that time, I was ready to box it up and return it. I had already bought an Acer AspireRevo with the intention of installing XBMC on it (I'm a long time XBox w/XBMC user). I may still end up going that route, but I did want to provide some updates on my prior criticisms of the WDTV Live...


Derelict_Drvr suggested that perhaps my .ISO rip was the problem here, and I'm willing to accept this theory. I haven't been able to play the .ISO at all on my Acer AspireRevo running XBMC and I'm not sure what Windows apps can play .ISO files (I've tried PowerDVD 8 and Media Center Classic Home Cinema - any other ideas?), so I have no way to confirm this.


One or more people pointed out that if I went into FF mode, I could then use the "Next" button to jump 10 minutes. That's more counterintuitive than I'd like, but I'm also a long-time TiVo user, so it's not that different than what they do. In any case, it gets the job done.


No one recommended it, but I did discover that there are two other view modes (list mode and preview mode). Ideally, I'd like a list mode with boxart or fanart (or even just decent-sized thumbnails). Is such a thing possible?


Thanks to blackssr for the tip about setting "auto log in". One problem solved.

When all is said and done, the UI is still horrible IMO. But I mainly use my XBox w/XBMC to play back my ripped movies, and I could probably get by with the WDTV Live's awful UI for that purpose. The small size, low price, and high-bitrate content compatibility are certainly compelling.

Getting back to the Revo w/XBMC...

So when I last updated this thread, I had decided to reinstall from scratch. What an adventure.

First I attempted to reinstall to my 8GB USB stick. Everything seemed to go fine, but I ran into problems FTP'ing my xTV skin over to it. It seemed to be acting as though my USB stick was read-only.

So after messing with that for a while, to no avail, I searched my house again and found a 2GB SD card. I figured I'd give that a try first. Everything installed fine, but when I went to boot up my Revo for the first time with the SD card, I discovered that the Revo apparently can't boot up with an SD card. Doh!

So back to my 8GB USB stick...I decided to try running a chkdsk on it from my laptop. Sure enough, it reported several issues. I then reformatted it from the laptop successfully. Then I went back to the Revo with my DVD-R and attempted to install XBMC Live to the USB stick again. This time everything worked fine, including my ability to FTP my xTV skin over to it, etc. So I'm back in operation again.

My next step was to try playing my Ratatouille Blu-ray .iso file which I was able to play with the WDTV Live (though it wasn't starting at the beginning). Well, the Revo/XBMC wouldn't play the .iso at all. I'm not up to date on what XBMC is or isn't capable of. Should I be able to play Blu-ray .iso files? If not, is there an easy-to-use program which will convert my full-folder/file-structure Blu-ray rip (consisting of multiple .m2ts files) to a single file which can be played back via XBMC?

Went to boot up my Revo today, and it looks like XBMC is hosed again. After getting the big, throbbing XBMC logo, the screen goes blank, my LCD TV reports "Lost Signal", etc., just as I experienced previously.

At this point I've decided that getting XBMC Live working (stably) with my USB stick is more trouble than it's worth. It's very possible that the problem lies with my particular USB stick, but I'd rather not go through this exercise again with another stick only to have it happen again.

I decided to take a temporary detour and install the Windows version of XBMC under XP on the Revo. This installed fine, but I was surprised to see that it wouldn't recognize my Media Center remote control. Do I need to do something special to get that working?

Next step will be to read up on installing Linux/XBMC to a partition on the Revo's hard drive. Using XBMC Live to do this is not a desirable option for me, as the Live CD won't install to separate partition, so it would result in me losing the XP install.

Sean, did you run into issues similar to what I experienced? Were you installing to a USB stick?

I'll try to familiarize myself with ToNMT. Someone else also recommended I look at tsMuxeR, because it has an option to downmix Dolby TrueHD to regular DD 5.1. I don't know about XBMC yet, but with the WDTV Live, it will bitstream Dolby TrueHD, but won't downmix it on-the-fly. With a Blu-ray I just ripped for testing purposes, the only English soundtrack is the Dolby TrueHD soundtrack. If XBMC can both bitstream and downmix on-the-fly this soundtrack, that would be a big plus. Otherwise, I'd have to either downmix while ripping, or somehow figure out how to downmix but also keep the original soundtrack. Ideally, I'd want to have the Dolby TrueHD track there for when I'm playing the movie in my home theater, but also have the ability to play the movie in other rooms of my house which would have the streamer connected directly to the LCD/Plasma TV.

Not to get too off-topic, but just to clarify...Does the A-110 offer the choice of bitstreaming or downconverting Dolby TrueHD, or does it just do one or the other? And what about DTS-HD?