XBMC, MythTV and the Acer Aspire Revo 3600
I was reminded of the Acer AspireRevo I read about on Engadget a while ago during a surf of Justin Mason’s delicious bookmarks. I ended up at the page that everyone’s linking to:
Build a Silent, Standalone XBMC Media Center On the Cheap
Man, that is one attractive (and small!) nettop unit.
<more Revo nettop pr0n here>
A review on The Register’s website mentions what is (for me) the biggest positive for buying this unit:
The main virtue of the Atom is its low power draw, and the Revo is truly astonishing in that regard, sucking less than 20W at the mains plug. The point here is, of course, that the Revo is mains powered so you don’t need to save every last Watt to make the most of your battery as you would with a netbook.
If you use a full-size PC for your home theatre PC, and (like me) you leave it powered on all the time, it’s painful to do the math on how much money you’re wasting on electricity bills. However, buying the Revo nettop and using it for your HTPC instead could save you enough money on electricity to pay for itself in a short while!
(OK, I might be overexaggerating a bit there… but feel free to use that line in case you need give your significant other reasons for buying this unit.)
Everywhere you look, vendors are selling this unit for a very low price… which means that it’s either a secret way to rid themselves of junk, or there’s a new version of it coming out soon. As you can guess, it’s the latter.
The new Revo is listed on some vendors’ sites now (see below), and is powered by a dual-core Atom 330 processor, along with 4GB of RAM and new video outputs. Make sure you know which one you’re actually buying, as some vendors are selling the new unit cheaper than the old one!
Using XBMC on this nettop would probably be the best use of it, if you were only going to watch media on your television… just make sure you get a remote control working. *grin* After searching around, I found a very specific link on installing XBMC on the Revo, here on the XBMC website.
I would prefer to use MythTV on this unit, but as it’s a nettop machine, there’s no way to use a video capture card like you would in a regular PC. However, I did come across a USB unit which will do DVB-S free-to-air channels: the WinTV-NOVA-S-USB2.
It doesn’t work with MythTV at the moment, but I hope to do some hacking around with it and see how I get on. If you want to use it with Windows, however, it works fine – just make sure to get the latest drivers from the Hauppauge forums, as the ones that came with the unit aren’t as stable.
Here is a vendor link for the single-core Revo unit (Ebuyer) and some for the dual-core Revo unit (Microwarehouse / Ballicom / Insight).
If you want to learn more about home theatre PCs and playing your content on the TV, you can do so by starting at these links and branching out from there:
Media Centre info at Wikipedia
FLOSS Media Center State of the Art Comparison Chart
Google search for the Acer Aspire Revo 3600
UPDATE (26 Nov 2009): I have removed some of the vendor links above, as their sites and stock have changed so much even I’m confused as to what’s out there now. Apologies for any issues this might have caused… you know who you are. *grin*