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I store all of my media on a file server (running Ubuntu Server 10.04) which currently contains a 6TB RAID5 array, then stream whatever I want to watch to a client device hooked up to my TV, up until yesterday this was a Popcorn Hour A-110. Although the A-110 plays back almost anything I throw at it, and generally flawlessly, the navigation is not the best, the UI is not the prettiest to look at and the network functionality is pretty slow. I’ve had my eye on Boxee for a while now and have been patiently waiting for the release of the Boxee Box, but they’ve recently announced on their blog that it has been delayed until November 2010 for the US release, and no mention of the Europe release. With this in mind, I decided to run Boxee on a low powered HTPC.

A couple of people in both forums and IRC have recommended the Acer Aspire Revo 3610 net-top machine as a candidate for running Boxee, so after a little research I picked on up from eBuyer at a bargain £180 for the N330 / 2GB / 250GB / Linpus configuration, delivered the next day for free. After firing it up for the first time, I spent less than 5 minutes poking around the pre-installed Linpus out of curiosity (the 250GB disk was oddly configured with a single 10GB partition), then promptly wiped it and installed Ubuntu 10.04 (x64) and the latest Boxee release.

Having previously read Liam Green-Hughes’ website, I was aware that I needed to tweak some settings to get the digital sound working, though there was a slight difference with my Revo in that I have three different S/PDIF levels within alsamixer – “S/PDIF”, “S/PDIF Default PCM” and “S/PDIF 1″. I un-muted all  of them but have yet to experiment to see what each of them does. I set my output device to “Digital Stereo (IEC958) Output” within the Ubuntu sound configuration as I want the audio to be sent to my amp over S/PDIF for decoding; after messing around with a few different combinations of settings within Boxee I was getting sound for files encoded with normal stereo sound, but silence for anything with multiple channels (DD / DTS). After a couple of hours of tinkering and research, it turns out that pulseaudio has a default sample rate of 44.1kHz and AC3 (Dolby Digital) is signed 16-bit little-endian 2-channel 48kHz PCM data, configuring pulseaudio to run with a sample rate of 48kHz appears to have fixed the issue, as I am now getting DD and DTS passed to my amp for every media file I have tested.

After playing around with the Revo / Boxee combination for about a day, it’s generally all positive; it plays back 720p/1080p content perfectly by passing the majority of the HD video decoding to the ION chip with the help of VDPAU available within GNU/Linux, the CPU is running at ~10% during all of this while managing perfectly with non-HD content too but with a little more strain on the N330. While “idling” on the Boxee home screen, one of the CPU’s threads is curiously always running at 100% load, though it is possible it is still indexing all of my media with it reporting “identifying” next to one of my sources. It has currently successfully identified 99% of my media requiring me to manually identify a handful of files, but this is perfectly acceptable considering the brilliant interface complete with covers and descriptions for all of my movies and TV shows. There is a slightly annoying wait when switching between the different areas of Boxee and sometimes a slight bit of lag when browsing through the media, but this could be down to it still indexing the content.

There appears to be plenty more to play with such as web content and applications, from what I have looked at, Flash video plays back fine in standard definition but HD Flash content is completely unwatchable – This is likely down to the lack of 64bit Linux support from Adobe. Other web based content such as the video made available within the Revision 3 application plays back perfectly, I’m pretty sure it’s HD too, but I couldn’t find an option to switch between the different encodings of their content.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 27th, 2010 at 5:23 pm and is filed under Gadgets, GNU Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.