I have an Acer Aspire Revo 1600 nettop with maxed out 4GB of RAM.
I'm wondering what the ultimate solution is for installing XBMC on it?
I would like to have movies run silky smooth and set up the Nettop running XBMC on it to have access to files on both PC and Mac seamlessly. (OSX 10.7 and Windows 7)
Should I run Ubuntu 10, 11, or 12? What version of XBMC should I use? Should I set up a Samba share? And is it possible to make XBMC run automatically as soon as I hit the power button on the Revo?
Any good suggestions for how to go about doing this is greatly appreciated! I am hoping that the Revo 1600 is still all that I need for a good low power HTPC, especially now that it has been upgraded to 4GB of RAM..
Thanks!
I installed openelec on my acer revo 1600 and it runs perfectly smooth, even suspends and resumes with remote. Before discovering openelec I tried ubuntu and windows and could never get smooth playback.
Mike
Hey Mike,
Thanks - good to know. Did you install Openelec on Ubuntu? And is that running XBMC on Openelec? If so, which version of Ubuntu?
I am also wondering if you can connect to Mac or PC shared folders within XBMC on it?
Thanks again!
Openelec is its own stripped out version of linux, not need for an underlying dist. You want openelec for the ion platform. You should be good with both windows and macos file sharing with openelec.
Pick up a class 6 or 10 SD card or a micro pen drive and whack openelec on there. Keep what you want on the internal HDD. Set the bios to boot from this device.
IMHO its a bit of a waste to put openelec on the internal HDD while it could be used for something else (*HINT* ubuntu\windows and play with nightlies and partitioned for extra storage
*HINT*)
I also have a REVO 1600. I used Openelec. Checkout their site Openelec.tv and read through the how to section. Basically you download the ION build and use a windows machine to build a bootable USB drive that will then install Openelec to another USB or SD card plugged into the Revo 1600. Their site walks you through each of the steps. It's not overly complicated.
1080p buttery smooth and it's the easiest of all installs.
Bumping this old thread with a few questions. I have two Revo 1600's in my house. One with the stock Windows XP and 1GB RAM, and another I upgraded the RAM to 2GB and installed Windows 7 on. My source content consists of full-bitrate Blu-ray .MKV rips and HDTV MPEG-2 Windows Media Center (.wtv) files.
1) Is using XP even a viable option these days? Way back when I remember that I needed to use an external player (MPC-HC) with XBMC under XP because XBMC didn't offer GPU decoding under XP (only Win 7), but I don't know if that has changed.
2) Is OpenELEC a much better option than using Win 7? If so, how/why? I don't expect to use these boxes for anything other than as an XBMC box, but I'm more familiar/comfortable with the Windows UI, so dragging/dropping files, downloading/installing updates, etc. is a bit easier for me under XP or Win 7, but if there's a noticeable improvement in playback quality/smoothness/whatever by using OpenELEC, I'm willing to do that.
3) Using OpenELEC, is it still advised to upgrade the RAM (if I remember correctly, the Video RAM allocation was limited with the stock RAM but you could bump it up a bit when you increased the RAM) or should the stock RAM size be fine? If I can make do with what I have and not spend extra money, that would be nice. Edit: The OpenELEC site did seem to mention maxing out the Video RAM in the BIOS settings, so maybe that's a must-do item? Is 2GB enough? Is there any advantage to going all the way to 4GB?
4) On that note, if I don't already have a spare USB drive or SD card hanging around (I do, but they may not cut it as "high speed") is it still fairly easy (and just as good performance-wise) to install OpenELEC onto a partition on the Revo 1600's hard drive? Edit: I took a quick look at the OpenELEC website, and see that their install process seems to be aimed around installing to an SD card or USB stick, so perhaps installing to a partition would add a good deal more complexity? In any case, I quickly shuffled through my drawers and found that I had, indeed, purchased two Transcend 4GB Class 6 SDHC cards quite a while back, so I'm guessing those should be good.
5) Is there any advantage of a Pivos XIOS over these Revo 1600's or should the Revo 1600 be superior to the Pivos XIOS in every way in terms of UI performance and playback quality? The things that intrigue me about the XIOS are the low price, smaller size, fanless design, and built-in IR receiver.
Well, I'd still appreciate answers to the questions I posed, but I wanted to provide an update. Since posting my last message, I did a bit more research, downloaded/installed OpenELEC to a USB drive, and then booted up my Revo 1600 with that and an SD card in the slot and installed OpenELEC to that. It prompted me with a couple of questions not mentioned in the OpenELEC install guide (the 1st one about whether to use GPT Partitions - it defaulted to NO and I used that default, and the 2nd one about installing SSH - again it defaulted to NO and I used that default). If either of those choices were ill-advised, please let me know.
I then rebooted but it didn't want to default boot up with my SD card, despite me telling it to use USB or external drives (I forgot how it was worded in the BIOS), so I rebooted again and hit F12 to bring up the bootup screen, where it did allow me to select my SD card. Anyone know what I can/should do to get it to boot up automatically using the card in my Revo's SD slot?
Also, in the course of researching things, I discovered that I have BIOS version P01-A3, and there is a newer set of BIOS versions (P01-A4 and the Linux-flavored P01-A4L). Should I update my BIOS and, if so, should I definitely update it to the Linux-variation? I'd like to have the flexibility of still booting up to Windows.
Anyways, after getting it to boot up from the SD card, XBMC came up just fine. I realized that I didn't have my HP Windows Media Center USB IR receiver plugged in, so I plugged that in. I figured I'd probably need to reboot for it to see that, but I didn't, and it worked fine.
There was no sound activated in the GUI, but switching the "Audio output device" from the default "HDA NVidia ALC662 rev 1 Analog" to "HDA NVidia, HDMI" fixed that. I left the Audio output set to "Analog" and Speaker configuration to "2.0" for now, as I'm testing this in my bedroom and just using my TV's built-in speakers. If all goes well, this will be going back in my living room and connect to my AV Receiver, so I'll be changing those settings later.
I also changed the Video/Playback "Adjust display refresh rate to match video" setting from the default setting of "Off" to "On start/stop", but I left the standard refresh rate at 60Hz for now.
Now I just need to research how to go about getting add-ons loaded onto it. Specifically, I want to get PleXBMC on there. That add-on is not in the official repository, so I think I have to get the zip file moved over there. I'm assuming I can do that via Filezilla. They have a repository, but I can't seem to figure out how to point to their repository from within XBMC. That whole process seems unnecessarily complicated.
A couple of other updates...
- I finally got Filezilla working after running into some initial difficulties. I had to set up an account within Filezilla and connect to it via SFTP. It turns out I could have saved myself the trouble, though, because the OpenELEC devs were clever enough to make the default install set up some SMB shares. So I could have just network shared over to it on my MacBook.
- As far as my bootup issues...my problem was that the Revo BIOS considers the SD slot to be an internal drive (like the hard drive), not an external one (like the USB ports). So I changed things back to use the internal drive as the 1st bootup, and then there's a second priority setting where you tell it to default to booting up from the SD card first, and the hard drive second.
Hi Scott, I found this thread looking for possible some help as I am also running XBMC OE on my Acer Revo R1600. Inistially I loaded 2.99.2 and this only gave me 800x600 resolution. After I switched to another HDMI input on my TV it gave me the 1920x1080 60Hz option. Until recently when a streaming sports feed froze, I had to kill it from the button, when it came up it went back to 800x600. Before that, the HDMI audio also worked, and now no longer works.
Mine is running P01-A4 of firmware, booting and loading (SD card) works just fine, I just can't get it to display video and get the sound working. Maybe I can get your sound/display config files and get them to work on mine.
Looking for the mode info from the Xorg.0.0.log file which is located here: /var/log/Xorg.0.0.log. I don't know if you can pull it and post it in a PM? Much appreciated.
I run a Revo 1600 fine as a mythtv frontend and xbmc machine. It uses ubuntu.
I too just purchased an ACER Aspire Revo R1600 and have been experimenting with XBMC.
It has 1G RAM and Windows7 Ultimate.
After cleaning up the previous owners stuff I installed XBMC Frodo and it plays perfectly.
I decided to give Openelec a whirl and it boots quickly and is very responsive. But I can't seem to get 1920x1080p resolution.
I am going to upgrade to 4G RAM and allocate 512b to the iGPU as the Openelec install wiki describes. You think that will get me to 1920x1080? THe latest stable release of Openelec has XBMC Eden - maybe upgrading to Frodo will help?)
Here are a couple of links to setting up the R1600 if it helps anyone...
http://lifehacker.com/5391308/build-a-si...-the-cheap
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=53888
I just have 2gb of memory on mine, win7 is acceptable as I have that installed on the internal hd.
Openelec is fast, way fast, I have it running on a sd card.
You don't need 4gb but it will likely help with win7. 1080p worked over hdmi, works great over vga, but I prefer to get it working again through hdmi.
Working on it..
I finally got my new RAM and now am up to 4GB.
Got a nice remote and things are working great. Really smooth and looking good.
One thing I have not been able to do is get it to boot from the SD Card. I changed the 1st boot device in the BIOS to the removable device but it still boots off the disk. If I hit F12 I see the selection is USB NEC device and can boot - but what am I doing wrong that it keeps booting to the internal HDD by default?
Are you still having issues?