Getting started advice....
#1
Hi all,

First post and want a bit of general guidance on the direction to head with xbmc. My background is with NMTs - have a PCH A110 and a C200 and pretty au fait with all that...a few kick off questions for xbmc...

1) The Acer Revo seems a good little unit to get started with, will this play anything i can throw at it - BD iso files and BDMV folders at the top end? What spec do i need to guarantee these play smoothly?

Any other solutions in the same cost bracket? Better/worse?

2) PCH skins/jukeboxes are all static html at the moment - from what little ive read xbmc appears to be dynamic and all scanning done from the Revo itself for example - plus 'live' editing of movie info etc? Is this accurate.

3) Can anyone explain the merits of Windows versus Linux for the purposes of xbmc on a device such as the Revo - im fairly good with windows OSs but not really familiar with Linux...I know Linux is generally a less hungry OS but is this going to be a mare to set up with no linux experience?

4) Is there much effort to get xbmc up with say AEON skin for a noob - want to understand the size of the task - not interested in web services, torrent clients of anything like that...I want a network share to my movies and nice pretty skin Smile

5) Are there many pre-requisite programs e.g. java runtime that must be installed for xbmc to run properly? Dont need a list, just an idea, lots or a couple?

Thanks in advance for your help

S
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#2
The Acer Revo's are nice little machines but make sure you go for a dual core if you want to play with eye candy. Aeon with all bells and whistles is pretty demanding. I set one up for a friend last summer with XBMC Live and haven't had to look at it since.

There is no perfect solution for XBMC but the Revo comes close. My main machine is an Aopen MP965-D running Windows 7 which lacks an HDMI out and has pretty lackluster graphics (Intel X3100) that calf on anything over 720p. I'll probably try adding a Broadcom Crystal HD card to that to handle 1080p.

You might want to hold out for a Boxee Box or other Tegra 2 next month. Looks very promising.

One of the greatest strengths of XBMC is its ability to download relevant movie/TV info. While the internal scanning is pretty stellar I use Ember Media Manager to fine tune my info.

XBMC for Windows is useful if you do other things with the machine besides XBMC. If you're going to use it purely as a replacement for a PCH I'd stick with XBMC Live.

Aeon is pretty simple to install though I think you still need to set up GitHub for the most current version. EMM is a nice program for getting all the screenshots and data that Aeon likes.

XBMC on Windows switched over to DirectX instead of OpenGL in recent months. While I could be wrong I'm pretty sure an up to date install of Windows should have most of the prereqs.
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#3
One the Windows DirectX version of XBMC, the installer is smart enough to check the host system for pre-reqs. If they are missing it downloads & installs them for you, making installation a no-brainer Smile
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#4
Thanks for the replies....ive installed the windows version and so far very impressed with it...graphically its on another level to the PCH although i have concerns over video - my PCH literally plays anything from avi files at the lowest end up to 50gb untouched bluray iso files - what sort of hardware do i need to replicate this with xbmc.....from what little reading ive done something like the Revo or the Asrock wont be able to handle these - is that accurate and do i need something with more ooomph?

S
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#5
The revo actually should handle anything you throw at it, but only if you use XBMC Live or XBMC for Linux. The Live version is very easy to use and you should be able to find guide on using it in about 10,000 different places.

With that said, for the Revo to handle everything, you'll probably want to make sure it has 2 gigs of RAM (and 512mb of that devoted to video RAM), though good results have been reported with as little as 1 gig.
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#6
See http://wiki.xbmc.org/?title=1080p_playba...ses_frames

I use a Revo 3600 with 1GB RAM and WinXP and it plays most 720p videos fine. I'm actually using a Crystal HD card, which plays 1080p, though this is a bit experimental at the moment and it does mean you sacrifice the wireless card.

JR
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#7
Thanks guys....to be honest id be tempted to just get a beastly one, 4gb of RAM and the quickest chip....that way it stands the best chance surely??

So you think it could handle BDMV or BD iso files with Full BD Navigation - actually just playback would be sufficient.

That leads me to the debate - Windows vs Linux which im sure is covered everywhere on here...is Linux better for HD stuff? Why should i not go for the windows install? My NAS drives are formatted ext3 so Linux would make things easier i guess...anything i should consider when choosing an OS?

S
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#8
Unless some major changes have happened without me knowing about it, there basically is no real "native" support for BluRay on Linux, and that will probably not change for a while. This reminds me a lot of the days before XBMC had DVD playback with menu support. If I recall correctly, until the XBMC guys made one there was no open source DVD player that had "proper" menu support, and developing it was fairly time intensive and difficult, but totally worth it.

I believe that a lot of the hold-up is due to the way the stuff is licensed (again like DVD playback), which is what necessitated building a new solution from the ground up to do the same thing commercial players already do. To make matters a bit worse, the BluRay standard is continuing to change and evolve, particularly with new web-oriented features creeping into BD Live discs.

In summation, it doesn't matter if one OS is "better" for HD playback at this point. If you want BluRay menu support, its pretty much Windows or bust.

It IS true that the various GPU-accelerated options are a bit more mature on Linux, particularly on the Nvidia side, but its also true you can set up XBMC to use an accelerated player core under Windows without too much hassle, so I wouldn't let that be a big concern.
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#9
Ok thanks.

So Bluray iso seems like a bit of a mare at the moment....to be honest im not too bothered about menus and navigation etc as long as the main movie plays ok....i have other players (A PCHC200 that does use these) so could i keep a BDMV structure and xbmc would just play the m2ts according to the mpls playlist? I dont want to start remuxing just for xbmc....is windows still my best bet for this? If so XP, Vista or 7?

S
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#10
Um. Your best bet for what? The only theoretical difference among the different version lies in remote support (to an extent) and GPU decoding.

For NVIDIA decoding your best bet remains Linux.

For CrystalHD, your best bet is a little uncertain, but I believe in theory it works under all platforms to some degree.

For ATI decoding, you are mostly out of luck, unless you want to try using the DSPlayer, and there you'd probably be best off with XP.

For CPU decoding, any dual core chip that can do about 2.8ghz and is moderately modern should do the job.

Finally, spiff says he's added preliminary support for bdmv file structure, but I'm not entirely sure what that means. See this thread for minimal details.

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid...light=bdmv
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