2013-12-28, 11:28
Hi Smonkey,
I'll try to answer your questions one by one:
1. Indeed, even with Mint I've never seen CPU load go above 10% while playing FullHD contents, so no issues there.
2. Hopefully the BIOS update will help, but don't hold your breath, often EDID issues are hard to track seeing as different manufacturers give it their own twist....
3. The black levels are probably ok for the casual viewer and not so apparent on a regular LCD TV. They do become noticeable on a Plasma though. Here's an xrandr example you can play with to tweak the gamma, brightness, refresh rate and Broadcast RGB levels:
xrandr --output HDMI1 --set "Broadcast RGB" "Full" -r 60 --gamma 1.20:1.20:1.20 --brightness 1.00
You can replace "Full" with "Limited 16:235" and see if that brightens things up for you.
This is a workaround though, a bit like twiddling with the brightness and contrast settings on your TV. A real fix would have to come with new drivers from Intel/Mint.
4. If you install the regular repo as shown here you will indeed install xbmc 12.3 including all dependencies, no other drivers/tweaks needed.
Regards,
Q
I'll try to answer your questions one by one:
1. Indeed, even with Mint I've never seen CPU load go above 10% while playing FullHD contents, so no issues there.
2. Hopefully the BIOS update will help, but don't hold your breath, often EDID issues are hard to track seeing as different manufacturers give it their own twist....
3. The black levels are probably ok for the casual viewer and not so apparent on a regular LCD TV. They do become noticeable on a Plasma though. Here's an xrandr example you can play with to tweak the gamma, brightness, refresh rate and Broadcast RGB levels:
xrandr --output HDMI1 --set "Broadcast RGB" "Full" -r 60 --gamma 1.20:1.20:1.20 --brightness 1.00
You can replace "Full" with "Limited 16:235" and see if that brightens things up for you.
This is a workaround though, a bit like twiddling with the brightness and contrast settings on your TV. A real fix would have to come with new drivers from Intel/Mint.
4. If you install the regular repo as shown here you will indeed install xbmc 12.3 including all dependencies, no other drivers/tweaks needed.
Regards,
Q
(2013-12-28, 01:08)smonkey Wrote: Thanks for the replies!
DDD - replacing everything with XBMC isn't really possible, I like to use it to playback downloaded content, but for watching live TV, it's easier for the family just to use Sky (plus games consoles etc..). The issue only happens on my main TV (other TV is fine), but I've been reading the NUC forums and apparently they will issue a BIOS update which will fix HDMI handshake problems. The problem also happens when I turn the TV off, so there isn't really a workaround.
quintixbox - thanks for the info, I'll probably just end up going for Mint. I won't really use the desktop but seeing as the chip is very powerful, it wont cause any performance issues by having it running in the background. OpenELEC is brilliant, but I'm a sysadmin so really want to be able to do things like use the NUC as a NAS (with external drives), possibly HTTP server, maybe hosting my own emails etc.. with postfix, dns server, maybe even VOIP with asterisk at some point.
How bad are the black levels, and are there any known fixes? I've only used it a few times with Ubuntu server but haven't really noticed any problems with that - I assume that the Mint deb would be the same.
Edit: One more thing, I really need to stick with 12.3 at the moment because a lot of the streaming plugins I use don't work in Gotham due to things like python versions.
I've skimmed through a lot of this thread, but to save me reading through 145 pages, can you point me in the direction of the xrandr tweaks?
Finally, am I right in assuming that in mint I just add the repo and install xbmc, with the dependencies taking care of the rest? No other drivers/tweaks needed?
