Matt Daubneys Blog

Having had MythTV running on a monitor for a little while, complete with it’s scheduling fantasticness, I finally caved to getting a machine to play it out to the big TV. An obvious candidate for this was the, very affordable, Acer Aspire Revo.

The spec of the machine itself is not that impressive when compared to modern desktops, a 1.6GHz single core Intel Atom, a lonely GB of RAM, a 1Gb LAN connection, an atheros 802.11n wireless chipset and no real expansion capabilities. The saving grace of all this is he Nvidia ION chipset inside the box. Using a media player that can utilise libvdpau this means that using the onboard hdmi port it can play HD video quite happily at 1080p \o/

The machine I purchased supposedly came with Linux pre-installed, but when I first switched it on all it did was through a screen full of “99″‘s . This didn’t bother me overmuch as I’d already intended to stick Mythbuntu on it. Sticking Mythbuntu on a bootable USB stick and then installing it took about an hour in total using the fast connection in my office. Once installed, I plugged it into my TV at home, booted it up and …. nothing. It just didn’t appear on the TV. A little reading around the interwebs and it appears that the HDMI connection is not discovered unless the TV is switched on before the machine is booted. So switch on the telle, stick it on the correct channel, reboot and it just works!

After connecting it to the wireless network and letting the mythtv frontend find the already running backend. Turns out the onboard wireless doesn’t play nice with my existing router. While playing back SD stuff was fine, there just wasn’t the bandwidth stable enough to stream HD stuff across the network. A little research and a touch of thought later, I had my hands on 2 Devolo 200Mbps ethernet over powerline adapters. These have allowed me to watch HD content I can get from the BBC iPlayer on the big TV!

How cool is that \o/