I’d wanted a PC for the front room for a while. Something that ideally could play movies, music and give me the ability to watch BBC iplayer. The trouble is, I didn’t have a fortune to spend, and I didn’t have space to hide a big and bulky PC.
My first attempt was to try a Sumvision Cyclone HD Media player. This little device came with 250GB hard drive an HDMI connection, network support (over Ethernet) and full HD playback. The trouble was, the interface was not so good, music playback was very basic and I found the whole thing rather limiting and slow to use.
However read a few references to the Revo on Twitter, I thought it was worth checking out. After umming and erring for a while, I eventually took the plunge and opted for the Acer Aspire Revo R3600 Desktop PC, Atom 230 1.6GHz, 160GB HDD, 1 GB RAM, HDMI, nVidia GeForce 9400 ION, WIFI, Linux version & bought a 2GB memory upgrade. All-in £181, which seems very reasonable.
This included next day before midday delivery, despite the fact that I’d ordered it on a Sunday afternoon. To my much surprise, it arrived well before the deadline, and to be honest I was doubtful I would see it at all on Monday, so hats off to Ebuyer, after this experience I’d happily recommend them.
The first thing I done was to wipe the hard drive and install Ubuntu 9.10 on it. The linux installed originally was their fast-boot Linpus linux which is rather quite limited and basic.
Now, I installed Boxee. There are a number of media centre applications available (MythTV, Freevo, XBMC) but Boxee is by far the more polished in my opinion. Whilst I’ve used XBMC quite a bit in the past, it misses out on the Apps like BBC iPlayer, ITV Player, 4OD and all the other online On-Demand applications.
Generally speaking, Boxee ‘just works’ and sets itself up nicely to detect video, pictures & music quickly. The only snag I hit was that a lot of TV Series on the hard drive were not detected. Once I figured out what to do though, it seemed fairly straight forward.
The one area it does seem to lack though is music playback. I want the ability to create playlists, or play randomly from all tracks of a particular artist, or everything at random. So far, I haven’t seen anyway to do this, despite the fact that XBMC can do so happily.
Overall, though I’m delighted with the Revo, its given me the flexibility that I want, with a tiny device that will sit quietly (VERY quietly!) tucked behind my telly.
