OpenELEC: Why did I ever use XBMC on Windows? - Page 6

Thanks !!!

It is hard to describe. It is certainly not silent, but I can't really hear it from more than 5-6 feet away. If there is any media playing at all you certainly can't hear it, even quiet music. Since it is a small fan, it has a slight whirr.
Edited by DanPackMan - 2/14/13 at 7:02am

So has anyone seen this:
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=64139&page=10

Native output in OE would be awesome, it would finally make it a viable alternative to dedicated streamers for those of us with good video processors. Question is, how do we go about getting it in? I actually succeeded in building OE from source once following the instructions on their site, but I've not been able to find any info about how to pull in patches/fixes/pull requests (like this and the Intel HD audio fix that's not in the official build yet).

Can anyone tell me why my system idles at 40FPS when running openelec? I run an AMD E-350 build, but I also just did an ION build. Both systems are running openelec. The ION system idles at 60fps, the AMD idles at 40FPS.

Movies seem to play fine on each, but shouldn't the AMD be at 60FPS as well?

Alright, I'm stuck at how to search for the problem I'm having

I'm using OE 3RC4 installed on an SSD in an Intel H61 w/ i3 sync'd to XBMC MySQL library

Previously everything was installed on an USB3.0 flash drive, but I was getting weird Sleep/Shutdown behavior that forced me to go and use the "hold-power-button-to-shutdown" method quite often just to get everything to stay off

I'd read it was unique to systems booting from usb, so I re-installed to an SSD and everything is pretty good

I've now noticed that everytime I resume from Sleep, video playback either hangs with a split second audio playback loop or presents a green screen with audio playback working fine. When the audio is playing, I think that I should just give the system a chance to deliver video, but after a literal minute of green screen I just issue a Stop and go reboot. When the video hangs, I can't issue anything and have to go press the physical "reset" button

I could power down everytime, but I like the resume from sleep wait time (1-2 seconds). A cold boot is about 8 seconds to XBMC Splashscreen and another 5 seconds for Aeon to finish loading. Also, sleep/resume is already programmed to my remote, and I don't want to start chasing my tail in search of a "on from S5" device for the remote

Am I alone? I'm using Intel 2.99.4 X86_64 build, but had the same experience with 2.99.2 and 2.99.3. I've yet to try XBMCbuntu instead

I recall having some green screen issues and I had to ensure DXVA was turned off in XBMC (seems like still buggy for Intel) and software render is used.
I've gone back to my working but sluggish windows experience until OE3.0 final is released.

Hadn't really thought of that, but it's worth a shot

It isn't an all the time behavior, only after a sleep/resume

This was not the issue. The same behavior occurred regardless of video playback settings (I tried all permutations)

The bios was quite old, so I flashed to the latest. Might have fixed the issue, but I haven't gotten around to testing yet

Tested, and I no longer have the issue. I can't explain why sleep/resume was screwy before, but it's working like I want now.

So to brag (now that everything is working) . . .

Harvested compaq case (sits behind TV) - $0
Asrock H61m - $45
Kingston 2GB DDR3 1333 - $13 (25 for two)
i3 2105 (originally g630, but too good $) - $80
Corsair CX430 - $25
Vertex Plus 60GB - $30
Harvested HP remote/sensor - $0 (should have been $20-$30 otherwise)

Total - $193 (would have stayed with g630 or now g2020 from microcenter for $163)

Is there an Echo in here? Nope Hopefully someday soon there will be a PVR backend that can support copy-once within XBMC (even for a fee), but my whole home HTPC nirvana has begun

Nice man! Glad you got it all worked out. I love these OpenELEC builds.

Does anyone know how the intel HD4000 graphics compares to the latest ION Nvidia graphics? Looking to do a new build soon, not sure which one to go with.

Anyone know anything about this barebones unit:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=56-176-029&SortField=0&SummaryType=0&Pagesize=10&PurchaseMark=&SelectedRating=3&VideoOnlyMark=False&VendorMark=&IsFeedbackTab=true&Keywords=%28keywords%29#scrollFullInfo

One reviewer says he is running OE on it. Obviously it will work. What I am interested in is if it will handle the HD audio codecs. My blu ray rips are all MKV files with HD audio only. I have a Dune player that was originally set up with an HDMI matrix to stream the movies to 4 locations. The Dune does not play well with my matrix so I have moved it from my rack to behind 1 of my TVs where the kids use it.

I am much more comfortable going a PC route this time around, but need HD audio, downmix to stereo and either bitstream or convert to Multi PCM is required.

It seems the new release candidate builds for the ION GPU support HD audio, but I can't tell if this one of those GPUs or not.

The price is hard to beat if it supports HD audio, that's for sure.

Thanks in advance.

I'm actually not sure if it supports HD audio, but I disagree that the price is hard to beat

For preconfigured this is not a bad deal LINK

For barebones, one of these should work great LINK or LINK

Seems like a reasonable difference in price for a DVD drive (referring to the 2 barebones links)

OE images are being made specifically for these systems

When the last couple hitches are sorted out, I think the cheapest possible units will be something like the Pivos Xios DS.

The build I posted above could be cheaper if you used the G1610 instead (supports hd audio just fine) and a flash drive in place of the SSD. Although, I couldn't get sleep/resume working when I put everything on a flash drive. It's still in RC, so that could be sorted out in final. Sleep/resume might not matter either, since power off / on was already stable

I got Openelec up and running on a OEM box that was having problems playing 1080p vids. Installed openelec and i'm getting smooth playback..it's amazing! My only question now is that...video seems out of focus and the fonts are not smooth and seems very pixelated. I'm currently using a GT610 with the latest video drivers. Any thoughts?

Thanks for the reply. I took a look at those Arctic options after seeing a link for them at the OE website yesterday. They are all listed as "currently unavailable." I love the price and form factor, the barebones $129 model with a USB stick and 2/4GB of memory would be a real bargain. I am not in a huge hurry, but I didn't see anywhere that there was a time frame these would be available again. Any ideas? A year was interested in building a home server with unRaid. Limetech had listings for their purpose built machines and prices but they were out of stock and had no ETA. I waited and waited and then went another route (wound up saving quite a bit of cash too, so it worked out).

Anyway, I'm excited to give this a try. I currently don't use XBMC at all so this will be a from scratch learning experience for me.

Found in a different thread by Macks

http://aaawave.com/p-16657-arctic-dpaco-mc11401-gb-mc001-n-barebone-pc-entertainment-center.aspx

Also, 2GB is sufficient for OE. I use it near daily w/ 480, 720p, 1080i, 1080p videos no problem

Might get better response in your own thread, but to start we'd need to know more about content and settings
Content

• h264, vc1, mpeg2?
• avi, mp4, mkv?
• 480, 720, 1080i, 1080p?

Video Settings

• Fullscreen or windowed?
• Which HW acceleration setting and scaling settings?
• All parts of video look out of focus, or just the subtitle fonts (assume you mean subtitles when you say fonts)?
• During playback and when paused?

Thanks, found that thread too. Just ordered. Tempted to order 2 at the $99 price with free shipping.

I was thinking of using a small USB stick to run the OE OS. Any issues with that would you think on this box?

Well, I've run a small library (250 titles) build off of a USB 2.0 8GB stick. (From the $20 4-pack of colored cruzer sticks at Sam's Club) It has been working great for a while with no issues

I've never tried running my 1500 title library off of usb 2.0. My OE box runs on the h61m us3s, so I used a microcenter branded USB 3.0 stick and it never seemed sluggish. Essentially the same performance as the SSD for menu navigation

I mention all this since the Arctic back panel only has USB 2.0 ports (where I'd place the boot stick) whereas the front panel has USB 3.0 ports. Don't know if you care whether or not the boot stick is on the front of the device, and I suppose it wouldn't matter if they made any USB 3.0 sticks with the Cruzer Fit form factor (I don't know of any though)

The other considerations/reservations I can think of are

• Which specific SO-DIMM ram is needed
• Why is Corsair RAM not-compatible?

I’m curious as to whether or not there is room for a small fan or two inside the arctic case. Passive cooling is just not my thing. I’ll take the few added decibels of fan noise and cooler cpu/gpu temps anyday.

After observing a slightly strange thing with my Windows install of 12.1 I elected to give OpenElec a go today. While I am somewhat impressed there are far too many rough edges for me to even entertain the notion of switching to it.... at least with the hardware I am currently running for the PC that is in my entertainment center.

1. Installed from USB stick onto an SDHC and observe that when running from a 16X SDHC card the system speed is very slow. Not sure if this would be much improved by running directly on an SSD (as I do with Windows). CPUs are barely idling so not sure why it is so pokey. Over 90 minutes to scan in (from scratch) a 350 movie library. Under windows this takes perhaps 2-3 minutes tops.
2. Doesn't support much for my Radeon card. No HD Audio support. That's a veto right there.
3. IR/USB keyboard and remote are very sluggish with button push recognition (some keys not recognized). Not the "out of the box" experience I was hoping for. Would probably have to build advancedsettings and start screwing around with keyboard delay times, IR maps, etc. Yick.

If I was building from scratch and using hardware that was known to be compatible, I would consider it. Certainly there is much appeal to eliminating all of the Windows maintenance and overhead. Right now though, my Windows install (at least on my i3 + 6450 rig) looks pretty damn good compared to what OpenElec is currently capable of for people with the gear I have invested in.

If I elect to go further, what is a good video card to use? I won't use the integrated Intel 4000 graphics because they don't handle 23.976 particularly well (still get several noticeable frame drops in a full length movie).

The initial scan was very slow, but nothing needed to be downloaded, as all of my movies have NFO files, artwork, etc, all generated by Ember. When I run a full initial scan on a Windows install of XBMC it takes just a few minutes, not an hour or more.

In any event, the experiment is over, as we do watch rental BDs on our Windows install of XBMC quite frequently (I have Any DVD HD installed and have a BD drive in the machine) and it appears that this won't work under Linux.

FWIW, OpenELEC performance on SD cards depends highly on the class and speed of the card. Not all Class 10s are equal. Also, from what I have come to understand, you can get better performance using a good USB drive instead of an SD card, and the best performance is to use a USB 3.0 flash drive plugged in to a USB 2.0 port (as USB 3.0 ports don't appear to support boot functionality).

Scan times are slow on any of these, but once your library is set up, the interface can be quite snappy.

Interesting to see the OpenELEC 3.0 is out..... might have to take a look, but I hate to mess with something that is not broken.
Edited by DanPackMan - 3/26/13 at 6:08am

I just finished upgrading my HTPC last night, and also installed OpenELEC 3.0


Figured I would bump this thread. My old build consisted of:
Asus mATX board and an AMD Zacate E-350
8GB RAM (though only showed as 4GB because I had to run the 32-bit version of OE)
Discrete Asus Nvidia GT520 vid card (for HD audio in OE)

It has been good to me…started off a couple of years ago as a full windows 7 build, and then switched to OpenELEC last year once the AMD platforms were supported. I’ve never had any problems with it. All I use this machine for is playback of blu-ray rips and some internet radio. Skipping through a movie could at times be painful as it had trouble keeping up, but that wasn’t very often.
I picked up a new ASRock mATX H77 chipset board, i3 ivy bridge cpu, and Corsair Vengeance DDR3-1600MHz RAM. This things boots to the xbmc homescreen (aeon nox skin) in about 20 seconds, and that’s with a normal 3.5” 7200rpm Seagate hard drive. About half the time it took my Zacate to boot.

This ASRock board is pretty cool as well. The usb ports seem to stay powered on even when the system is off. There is an option in the bios to start the pc with the press of any keyboard button, mouse movement, or remote button press. I haven’t gotten it to power on with my harmony remote yet, but it will power on if I hit any keyboard button. There is also some sort of IR pin header on the motherboard, but I have not read the manual to see how to utilize it. Pretty good board for $60, imo. The only thing that didn’t work for me is that my case has (2)front USB 3.0 ports, however the front USB 3.0 pin header on the motherboard has some sort of 19-pin layout? Not sure, but it’s not the same size and layout as a normal USB pin header. The case is a Silverstone GD05B. I need to search online to see if there’s an adapter that will work. For now, front USB 2.0 is fine with me, as there are (2) USB 3.0 ports on the rear.

I have all three case fans at a little less than half speed, cpu fan set to automatic…and this thing is barely audible from 5ft away. CPU temps stayed at 35-40C. Stock intel cooler.

Just thought I’d share. Quick question…does anyone else run Amazon Prime in XBMC? I got it set up last night, but the layout is terrible. I was hoping the experience would be similar to the Prime app on PS3 or Roku, but it was not like that at all. All movies showed up as 480p, I didn’t see prices on movies, what movies were or weren’t included with Prime, and it seemed hard to navigate. Thought about selling my Roku, but I think I’ll hold onto it for the time being.

OK, so since my brief experiment with OpenElec 3 installed onto an SDHC card piqued my curiosity I spent some more time today messing around with it. This time I installed it on a spare 2.5" 5400 RPM hard drive I had lying around. I also removed the ATI card and tested it with just the build in Intel graphics (HD2000).

1. Speed is MUCH better. Remote is still a little less responsive but I think this is because OpenElec does not fully support "remote sends keyboard commands" option. I ended up just using the Windows Media Center remote profile on my Harmony and it was a bit slow but acceptable. On this hard drive the speed is pretty close to what I get with an SSD with Windows.

2. I had trouble with VC1 with video acceleration enabled. Had to turn it off.

3. The HD 2000 only appears to support 24.00. So, that's a problem.

4. HD 2000 did not appear to properly support bitstream of Dolby True (DTS MA worked fine). I disabled the bitstream option for Dolby True-HD and let XBMC convert it to PCM and that seemed to work fine.

5. Fast forward and rewind are pretty pokey compared to the ATI graphics under Windows. However, video sync between 60fps XBMC desktop and video playback at 24.00 is much faster and less obtrusive.

I had bought a GT610 "silent" card to try out but unfortunately the heatsink is far too large for the case I am using. I would really be interested to see what this thing could do with a Geforce video card. There are some that might fit but they are not fanless, and I'm not sure I'm willing to go that way.

Another option is the Intel NUC. I am becoming seriously tempted to give it a try.

I didn't boot from a flash drive for long, but it seemed very responsive.

What DanPackMan mentioned about the speed/class of the SD card is true, and to add the support for your card reader might not be USB2 speed which would make things feel very sluggish. However, I'm not sure if that's the issue based on your next comment
If you are using the WMC profile, you do not need the "Remote sends keyboard commands" option enabled. Everything feels snappy with my WMC remote or Flirc using WMC keyboard equivalents. I never enable "Remote sends keyboard commands" which may be the difference
Others have said this contrary to my experiences. I sometimes (rarely) get a quick pixely flash when initiating video playback that lasts about 1/10 of a second. It's not persistent and never occurs twice, but to me it's not worth me turning off acceleration.What troubles did you experience
I've always been unimpressed with FF/RW in XBMC. I like chapter skipping and typically resort to pressing the time and play rather than attempting to FF/RW. I didn't realize it would be improved by a graphics card.
Is your i3 using a fanless heatsink?

Well, I got rambunctious and went ahead and jammed the GT610 in there. It means I can't put the chassis cover on, but it suffices to do a quick test.

Compared to the HD2000 graphics with my i3, the FF/REW and video overall seem to be improved with the GT430. Surprisingly I still get periodic audio dropouts with Dolby True-HD... this could be due to my using the "sync to display" XBMC option, but no other audio formats are having trouble. Setting True-HD to disabled and sending it as PCM is a viable workaround to this problem.

This card does support 23.976, and in very limited testing, I do not appear to be getting dropped frames. Like the Intel card the speed of frequency changes is admirable, with just a quick hiccup, not the long pause I get with the ATI card under Windows.

I have a motherboard that has an Intel ICH2 header (which my ICH2 IR is plugged into) and I was delighted to discover that the MPC remote "power togglef" command actually power the system on and off perfectly with OpenElec. This was always irritating under Windows because Windows power management would just put the system to sleep instead of powering off (which is what I want).

Overall this is really growing on me. Two questions.

1. Can anyone recommend a lower profile silent (or very quiet) Nvidia card that supports HD Audio?
2. Can anyone PM me information about doing retail BD playback with OpenElec? I understand there is a file I need to install on the system to do this and I'd like to test it.

At this point I think I'm going to test this out for the next few days to see how the audio and video quality hold up during regular viewing. At that point, if it is solid, and if I can find a good Nvidia card that fits in my case, I think I'm going to switch over to OpenElec. I am becoming very impressed with it.

To answer Dark_Slayer's questions;

Under windows I would turn this on because I had my Harmony set to send a combination of Windows Media Center remote commands (keyboard buttons) as well as the standard WMC remote commands. For example, I have a button labeled "diagnostics" on my harmony that sends the "o" keyboard button so I can check frame-rate sync, etc. It does not look like this will work under OpenElec so I will disable it and learn to live without it. My IR sensor sits inside my PC case and is not super sensitive so that might also be affecting things.

Nope, just using the stock HSF.

Little more info on my experiment.

I wasn't getting proper sync with the GT610 running 23.976 BD rips to my Panasonic VT30 TV. Investigating I discovered that there is a known issue in OpenElec with Nvidia cards in which they won't pick up the 23.976 modeline... instead picking up 23.971 (or something like that). Doesn't seem like much but was enough that when I sync the setup to my display and use audio drop/dupe I would get short audio dropouts every minute or so.

Created a custom xorg.conf with the proper Nvidia information and it seems to have solved that problem. I was able to play a 1 hour section of a movie using "sync to display" and "match refresh rate to source" with no packet errors in the log file, indicating that AFAIK it is synced pretty damn well now. Not sure what the exact clock rate is, but if it can go 2+ hours for a full length movie without an audio hiccup that's good enough for me.

I also observed that I am getting better lip sync delay with 24P content then I ever got under XBMC with Windows and my ATI card.

OK, so I've completed the transition to OpenElec. The moment of no return was when I installed onto the 32GB SSD drive that previously had run my Windows installation (in fairness I did back this up ahead of time).

Here's my observations so far;

OpenElec Pros;

1. Boots (from SSD) in under 10 seconds.
2. No messing around with Windows Drivers and settings to get proper AV sync and performance for XBMC.
3. Never a Windows pop-up or "update" message that interrupts a viewing session.
4. Full compatibility with the MANY add-ons and skins available.
5. On a new build, no $100 outlay for a Windows license.
6. Overall better performance than under Windows.

OpenElec Cons;

1. No BD playback support.
2. No web support for things like Netflix (in fairness, I never used Netflix, etc, anyways).
3. Poorer IR response from my Logitech Harmony remote.