[lettcco]

Hi all...

newbie here. I am fed up with my ps3 not able to properly stream .mkv files from my server, so I am looking into building a xbmc box for my movie needs.

I am leaning toward acer revo r3610 but then I found this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...-_-Product
Can anyone tell me if this is a good choice over the Acer revo?
I don't care if about the OS I have to use as long as it is able to play 1080p x264 mkv stream from server(dxva or vpdau)

Thank you very much!

[frumpy_uk]

Looks like that PC has ATI graphics. That means you won't be able to use VPDAU. Plenty of cheap nettops that will do VPDAU just search around here

[headcase]

I was considering a 3610, but then my wife got me a 1600 for Christmas (she didn't know there was a difference, she was just looking for 'acer revo'). 1600 works perfectly for 1080p. Even with only 1gb (I have another 1gb on order though just cause).

I did have to rearrange my wiring though, 1600 -> hdmi -> TV -> optical out -> receiver because I didn't have the optical out of the 3600.

I too am moving (back; had a modded xbox running xbmc way back when) to xbmc, from using PS3MS to stream to my PS3. Got tired of having to run everything through mkv2vob or make sure there was enough horsepower to transcode on the fly.

Having gone through it, the one big thing that I found nobody really mentioned in the acer revo guides is that if you want 5.1 audio over HDMI, setting passthrough and device to 'hdmi' didn't work for me. I had to use custom and pluginhw:0,3. The two guides, one here and the other on lifehacker, both fail to mention that they're just plugging straight into a TV and don't want 5.1 audio.

[lettcco]

Thank, headcase. For me, ps3 media server works great when it works. But it's not reliable enough (can't always open files that I want to watch without crashing, any movie longer than 2 hours video will start to stutter and audio go out of sync, subtitles requires mencoder which takes a lot of cpu power, can't fast forward/rewind when files are rared up)

I wanted acer revo R3610 with the atom 330 in case xbmc doesn't work out...but r1600 is 100 bucks cheaper. Are you running it in live CD? do you have any issue with it so far? Thanks