What Matters 2 Me

So you’ve heard about running XBMC on the Acer Aspire Revo 1600 and you need more info. You’ve come to the right place! This is an attempt to give a HOWTO on taking a new Revo, installing Ubuntu Karmic 9.10 and XBMC, and tweaking it so that the Nvidia Ion graphics chip does the decoding (VDPAU) for smooth playing of even HD videos. Also, it includes setting up audio over HDMI.

As you’ve probably heard, the Revo gives you more than your usual money’s worth by including an onboard Nvidia Ion graphics chip. The Nvidia engineers have very kindly released drivers which allow the graphics chip to do the video decoding rather than bogging down the rather slow Intel Atom 230 CPU with the chore. This results in only ~20% CPU utilization with near flawless playback of HD videos, instead of 100% CPU overload and very choppy video. A $200 computer that can do this is a very good deal.

I recommend a full install of Ubuntu Karmic 9.10. Other sites have instructions for installing a “minimal” gnome setup. I think this is silly. It strips the system of a host of useful applications, while providing non-discernible “improvements”. With the normal full installation of Ubuntu not only will you be able to play video and audio (movies and music) files, but should you choose, also browse the Internet, do email, perform normal office tasks (word processing, spreadsheets, presentations) and more. Provided, the Acer Revo is not a powerhouse and I wouldn’t recommend it for editing photos or videos.
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