For over a year now an HP pavilion PC has been performing it's Media Portal duties with minimal disruption hidden away beneath the 40" LCD in our lounge. I also have a Windows Home Server that's tucked away in the office that serves all my media throughout the house. Both of these machines are on pretty much 24/7 and sucking power all day long, however I did install the LightsOut plugin on the server which makes it shut down at midnight and start up again at 7am so saving a bit of power. I shudder to think what the girlfriend would do if MP didn't record her TV shows so I daren't try and make that machine go into standby even thought it would probably work....
My aim is to try and get the TV server up and running on the WHS machine and keep that on 24/7 and then have a small client under the TV that we just switch on whenever we want to watch something. Hopefully this will save a bit of power and also be a little more discrete and quiet.
I stumped up for an Acer Aspire Revo R3610 hoping that the dual core and ION graphics setup would be enough for DVB-T HD content along with all the other plugins and fan art that I just have to have.....
For the time being this little machine is going to be my test rig so will live next to the TV in the bedroom where I can tinker away to my hearts content. As I live in New Zealand this thread will be focused on how best to setup this machine so it works as well as it can with all the strange audio codecs that our freeview seems to have.
The idea is that anyone else purchasing one of these machines should have the EXACT same hardware as myself and thus we should be able to come up with the optimal configuration.
So if anyone already has one of these machines and has any input I'd love to hear from you as this thread will be a work in progress until we hit that sweet spot......
My current setup is as follows...
Machine - Acer Aspire Revo R3610
Processor - ATOM 330 Dual Core 1.6Ghz
Graphics - Nvidia ION
Memory - 2GB
Hard Drive - 320GB
Network Connection - Gigabit Lan (has wireless but won't be using this)
Operating System - Windows 7 Professional 32Bit
MediaPortal Version - 1.1 latest SVN build
TV Delivery Method - DVB-T Freeview
Current Codecs - SAF codec
Current Plugins....
TV Series - Latest release.... will get the actual number
Moving Pictures - Latest beta.... will get the actual number
At the moment it appears to be working okayish.... Can't get PRIME to work as it only shows the first frame of video with audio playing correctly. All other channels appear to work. Have an issue where the first divx or xvid file I play takes about 20 seconds to start and then all other attempts start immediately....
I suppose that's it for now, I will add some photos and more info over the next few days to give a better idea of where I'm at at the moment.
Hopefully a few of us R3610 users in NZ can get together and get this great little machine setup as the perfect MP client.....
Speak soon
Tommy
UPDATE : Have loaded the latest RC1 TV server onto my windows home server and MP Client onto the Revo. TV appears to be working although it's not as smooth as I'd like, a little choppy every now and then. CPU sits at 20% when viewing HD content.
Loaded the MP client onto my work DELL and HD content playback is flawless so looks like I've got some work to do on getting the Revo's codecs setup correctly...
My aim is to try and get the TV server up and running on the WHS machine and keep that on 24/7 and then have a small client under the TV that we just switch on whenever we want to watch something. Hopefully this will save a bit of power and also be a little more discrete and quiet.
I stumped up for an Acer Aspire Revo R3610 hoping that the dual core and ION graphics setup would be enough for DVB-T HD content along with all the other plugins and fan art that I just have to have.....
For the time being this little machine is going to be my test rig so will live next to the TV in the bedroom where I can tinker away to my hearts content. As I live in New Zealand this thread will be focused on how best to setup this machine so it works as well as it can with all the strange audio codecs that our freeview seems to have.
The idea is that anyone else purchasing one of these machines should have the EXACT same hardware as myself and thus we should be able to come up with the optimal configuration.
So if anyone already has one of these machines and has any input I'd love to hear from you as this thread will be a work in progress until we hit that sweet spot......
My current setup is as follows...
Machine - Acer Aspire Revo R3610
Processor - ATOM 330 Dual Core 1.6Ghz
Graphics - Nvidia ION
Memory - 2GB
Hard Drive - 320GB
Network Connection - Gigabit Lan (has wireless but won't be using this)
Operating System - Windows 7 Professional 32Bit
MediaPortal Version - 1.1 latest SVN build
TV Delivery Method - DVB-T Freeview
Current Codecs - SAF codec
Current Plugins....
TV Series - Latest release.... will get the actual number
Moving Pictures - Latest beta.... will get the actual number
At the moment it appears to be working okayish.... Can't get PRIME to work as it only shows the first frame of video with audio playing correctly. All other channels appear to work. Have an issue where the first divx or xvid file I play takes about 20 seconds to start and then all other attempts start immediately....
I suppose that's it for now, I will add some photos and more info over the next few days to give a better idea of where I'm at at the moment.
Hopefully a few of us R3610 users in NZ can get together and get this great little machine setup as the perfect MP client.....
Speak soon
Tommy
UPDATE : Have loaded the latest RC1 TV server onto my windows home server and MP Client onto the Revo. TV appears to be working although it's not as smooth as I'd like, a little choppy every now and then. CPU sits at 20% when viewing HD content.
Loaded the MP client onto my work DELL and HD content playback is flawless so looks like I've got some work to do on getting the Revo's codecs setup correctly...