XBMC for Linux success stories :)

Thanks Jezz_X,

I think I'll load Linux onto a PC and have a bit of a play around then. I suppose I need to be sure about my TV before I go ahead with the HTPC route.

John

johnnygal Wrote:How do you find the noise levels on the Fusion box (is it a V2 with the 430E PSU) and cpu cooler?

Yeah, I have the V2 model, with a Zalman CPU fan. The box is extremely quiet. I have the case fans and cpu fan at their lowest setting and it's no louder than my DirecTV PVR. If you speed up the fans, it gets quite loud, but I have never needed to do so.

Thanks Bryan, that's good to hear.

It works almost fine on my Ubuntu briefcase with a modification to have it work for the touchscreen. Check janpaulposma.nl/briefcase for pictures (images of XBMC are down on the page).

Still, it says that the CPU load is 100% and video stutters sometimes. I got an Nvidia Geforce4 TI graphics card. Anyone knows how to solve his?

First off trendy
second And this is purely a guess but I don't think gf4 cards support gl 2.0 under linux and you never said what type of video or what type of processor you have

Amd Athlon XP 2400, 1 GB Ram, Geforce 4 TI graphics card, Mobo Asrock, 1,5 TB on 4 harddisks.

Resolution is 800x600 because of the touchscreen (no HD for me!). Maybe it has something to do with the fact the screen is flipped because that was the only way to mount the touchscreen. I also downloaded the newest SVN now and it says: Total CPU 100%, XBMC CPU: around 78%. It seems to work better when I increase the nice value (priority of the process). I guess too it works with software rendering.

running XBMC on Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon)


EPIA EN 12000 Fanless VIA motherboard with a 1.2GHz Nehmiah Processor.
512 MB of RAM,
40GB ST340014A disk drive
PNY NVIDIA 6200 PCI VGA/TV-OUT/DVI
Wireless Keyboard and mouse.


Its a nigh on silent setup! Theres two small case fans that you can barely hear which is what I wanted.


SVN Rev 11073

works like a charm! Streaming media over my network from the media server in the loft. I'm using TV-OUT to my 32" INCH TV (tube not LCD). Resolution is that of the desktop 1024x768. Haven't tested anythign high def but I doubt it will work due to the specification of the hardware. Skin is set with a slight zoom to aid reading of fonts.

DVD playback was a bit dodgy at first but I switch to using the medibuntu reposirtory and everything seems to be fine now, I've managed to play quite a few DVDs through it now and only had one issue with choppy playback that went away when I restart the DVD and selected the scene I required. Don't know if that was software/hardware or disc but it wasn't a big deal.

I've changed the setup to allow for automatic log in and starting of my XBMC run scripted that launches XBMC in full screen mode. When you shut it down my script picks up the terminated XBMC app and then calls sudo shutdown , I had to modify /etc/sudoers to allow for my user to do this but it cuts out the need for the user to supply their password. So when I shutdown the box shuts down. I installed sshd server onto it so I can update what I need to remotely and because it boots and shutsdown without needing user intervention its missus friendly and shes got no complaints.

heres the contents of my run script its dead simple (like me ).

heres an example snippet of the sudoers file with the modifications you have to make to get it to allow you to sudo shutdown without password.
just add the lines you need as you see them here make sure the last line is after %admin or it wont work!!!!


If your worried that it wont let you back into the O/S when you quit you can always press \ to drop out to the O/S to tinker with anything . I just need it to shutdown when its told to and not go back to the O/S as that bit scares normal people .

Overall so far my experience has been great even more so now I have a script pack installed to stream internet media! I've now retiered my faithful MG-35 media streamer as I have an all in one player now!

xfaethorx Wrote:running XBMC on Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon)


EPIA EN 12000 Fanless VIA motherboard with a 1.2GHz Nehmiah Processor.
512 MB of RAM,
40GB ST340014A disk drive
PNY NVIDIA 6200 PCI VGA/TV-OUT/DVI
Wireless Keyboard and mouse.


Its a nigh on silent setup! Theres two small case fans that you can barely hear which is what I wanted.

Nice to see a such limited motherboard running XBMC. I was thinking of building a mini-itx pc to as a HTPC but were at first thinking of a jetway wich uses the intel GMA950 and the Core2Duo wich would give more punch but also more pricey.
The thing I'm wondering on you setup is if it were impossible to get to run with the onboard graphics card because another possible solution for me would be to use the newer epia ex1500g wich is quite fast, not fanless but silent.

Over and out.

The onboard graphics is one of the VIA Chrome AGP chipset peices of doody and I couldn't get the chrome stuff to work properly with ubuntu successfully. I got a 640x480 max res from the card no matter what output source was used. Also Althought it claimed it was doing opengl 2.0 I didn't get chance to really test it due to the fact it fell over quite a bit, X was slightly unstable and because I couldn't get the screen res I wanted I tossed using it to one side before I even installed XBMC. Its unfortunate because you can get a HDMI attachment for these boards and it would be nice to use the onboard stuff but it just wasn't 100% hence why i dropped to using the nvidia card which is also fan less so cuts down on noise.

I will admit when I started this i didn't think it would work on this hardware but it does and it does it well. It is more of a streaming box however as I have a server in the loft where all the data is. I've not run a localized video through it yet..but I'll test that in time. I'd say that this would really be a minimum spec however I have a spare ITX which i fancy trying it on which is a much smaller spec and closer to the XBOX so it might work.

All in all building this rigs cost me around £150 as the Mini-Itx was an ebay bargin , for £90 - full PC dvd,ram,board,case which was an amazing grab. It cost me £50 for the PCI card which was a bit steep but within budget and is really the only PCI card worth using on a mini-itx if you want to do something like this!! All the other bits and bats I had kicking around in my spares box bar for a new bluetooth adapter for the Wii remote which cost me around £8 just so i can use it .

I'm now on rev 11077 and as I said I've even got it working with my Wii Remote now to do the mouse i'm just having trouble with the additional butons (think its a sensor bar thing).

Topfs2 Wrote:Nice to see a such limited motherboard running XBMC. I was thinking of building a mini-itx pc to as a HTPC but were at first thinking of a jetway wich uses the intel GMA950 and the Core2Duo wich would give more punch but also more pricey.
The thing I'm wondering on you setup is if it were impossible to get to run with the onboard graphics card because another possible solution for me would be to use the newer epia ex1500g wich is quite fast, not fanless but silent.

Over and out.

To the Linux Dev team, and others interested in success stories. Thanks for this Linux port. Had switched to Windows MCE for HD content, after being a user of XBMC on the XBox for years! And I read the other week that XBMC was being ported to Linux in Alpha mode (yeah yeah, come on this is way better than Alpha ) Taken me two weeks to sort things out, and find the time, but now it's done!

Well I now have XBMC working on an AOpen MiniPC 965-DR, 2GB DDR2 RAM, T7700 (2.4GHz) Intel Duo Core CPU, on Ubuntu Linux i386 (32bit) 7.10 (Gutsy), connected to a 40inch Samsung 1080p HDTV.

I did have a few problems with getting overscan corrected (simple in the end, with changing the zoom setting on the TV to Just Scan!). Also I had originally installed the amd64 version of Ubuntu which caused problems.

But now... Wow, it streams x264 very high bitrate 1080p content over the network without issue. Audio works fine through SPDIF to my AMP, and music works just as XBMC used to. I've had a smile on my face for the last few hours, I just wanted to say how happy I am you guys have done this, thanks a lot.

Pictures crash after I select one over an SMB share (samba on another linux box), and I haven't got the remote work yet (not put too much effort in yet, anyone know which driver to use with the MiniPC 965DR?), but I love it. Keep up the good work!

Also as an aside, adding Changelog.txt to the SVN repository will stop a number of issues being raised, build.sh failed, until I'd read through the script, and found the bit that caused that to fail, and I just touched a changelog.txt!

Anyways, thank you very much. Nice to have success stories! (Oh an thanks for the iPhone style music album browser... nice!)

This is a 1.5 Open GL card (apparently), but it's soooo smooth, quick and responsive, way better than the other XBox, so dunno why others don't try the 965, it's a VERY quite, very small, and cheap box to use (£400).