[mailmarshall]

Hi

I am thinking of buying the Aspire Revo or Eeebox Eb1012 to run XBMC as a media centre but before I spend my cash I have a few queries.

1. Anyone got the either of these machine to play 1080p MKV files using WIN7 XBMC?

2. Were any mods required on the machine or did it play 'out of the box' on Win7?

3. Is it stutter free and is pic quality good?

4. What are you using for your remote?

5. Is it better to run XMBC Live from a USB thumb drive rather than the XBMC WIN version? DO I miss out on anythign from doing this?

6. Which one is better - EEEBOX or Revo

Sorry for all the newbie questions

[parrydave]

Hi
I use an Acer Revo R3160 with 2GB RAM running win7 32-bit. Have no experience of Eeebox, but here goes...

1) Plays 1080p MKV files fine.

2) Out-of the box? not quite. You need to allocate some additional memory to the GFX via Bios and then to install a recent nightly release of XBMC so that you can enable DXVA acceleration. Without DXVA, the Revo cannot do 1080p. With DXVA CPU% stays below 10-15%.

3) Stutter free and great PQ. I did have some issues configuring appropriate screen resolutions/refresh rates in windows to cover all possible XBMC playback modes. I think mostly cos my TV is a few years old and doesn't support/communicate the full set of combinations I needed. All sorted now though.

4) Remote, i'm using a Harmony 555. Simple to set up and effective.

5) Not tried Live. It may gives some performance benefit (i.e. via W7 i struggle to use some of the heavier skins with good interface speed). Not come across any other limitations.

6) Don't know.

Hope that helps.
Dave

[mailmarshall]

Thanks Dave.

Interesting to note your point around older tv perhaps causing additional configuration. I have a pretty old sony tv (still has hdmi tho). I am planning to connect the new media centre to my Yamaha Z7 via HDMI and then from the Z7 amp to tv using HDMI again.

Presume you are using HDMI?

[jhsrennie]

4. What are you using for your remote?

I would buy a Microsoft remote (on eBay since MS no longer make them) or a full compatible like the HP. If you decide to stretch to an Asrock 330HT the built in remote is MS compatible. Universal handsets like the Harmony usually have a setting to emulate the MS remote so it makes it very easy to configure.

JR

[d00chris]

I'm thinking about buying an Asus EEE EB1012U myself. I reckon the easiest thing would be to use the Windows7 installation that comes out-of-the-box together with a recent nightly build that supports DXVA2.

However, since this is a system with a fairly weak CPU, I wonder if I should favour the alternative (i.e. XBMC Live or Xubuntu) over this? Are the Linux alternatives noticeably better (performance-wise during video playback) ?

Also, does anyone know how well the EEE hardware capabilities (e.g. SD card readers) are supported in Linux?

[parrydave]

yep, using HDMI. My TV mis-reports supported modes in the EDID.