I think Popcorn Hour shot themselves in the foot when they launched their next generation C-200 media player. For about $300 (US) you get a box that does what it does and nothing more, has not native disk storage, has a small but fervent following and is not hugely customizable.

On the other hand, for $330 (US) you can get the Acer Aspire Revo with the ATOM 330 (dual core), ION hardware accelerated video processing, 2GB RAM, 160GB drive (plus a cute and usable wireless keyboard and mouse) and for $0 and about 10 minutes with a very easy guide, you can have a great XBMC media player that can do just about anything you want because it is standard PC hardware in a tiny little box. (OK, so that was too much of a run on sentence, but you get the idea.) Oh, if $330 is too much, there is a $200 version that has the same graphics !

What surprised me was that the Revo came with Windows 7 64bit Home edition. What surprised me more was that the obvious way of using XBMC was not the fastest or the easiest.

I first tried installing XBMC for Windows and it looked to be working perfectly. Then I tried playing one of my HD TV shows (a 1.1GB h.264 MKV file) and it shuddered – badly.

Next I tried the special DSPlayer version of XBMC that is setup to use the ION graphics. After about 5 hours of messing around with guides and trial and error, I threw in the towel.

Finally, I downloaded XBMC Live and using a handy guide, spent less than 10 minutes to create a bootable SD card (could have as easily been a USB stick) and had the Revo flying along perfectly. I even tried an action scene in an HD movie (performance hit 8Mb/sec video stream) from my NAS and the Revo was not even breaking a sweat – CPU(s) were about 20%-25% load.

My final setup – all anyone sees is the TV and me using the iPhone as a remote …

• Acer Aspire Revo R3610-U9022 (hidden behind the TV)
• network connection (the Revo has wireless ‘N’ but I don’t)
• HD (1080p) flat panel TV connected to the Revo with a single HDMI cable
• wireless mouse and keyboard (bundled with the Revo) (hidden in a draw) for the occasional upgrade or new feature
• NAS for most of my video
• XBMC Live installed to the Revo’s hard drive
• iPhone XBMC Remote (collect3)

So, my advice ? Get the Revo. Get XBMC Live. Try it with the SD or USB instructions. If you like it, format the drive and install it for good. Later, if you want, you can follow other guides and install downloaders for podcast, streaming video, and more. Even if you don’t leverage the Revo for all of it’s idle time and other capabilities, it is still a great deal for a great media player.

I’ve been on the fence about building / buying a replacement for my Popcorn Hour media player. It now looks like even the low end new NetTop PCs with the ATOM+ION combination are "good enough".

I liked the price of the new Acer AspireRevo entry level hardware ($200) since it has the ION graphics which handles 1080p for my TV. However, I was concerned with the underpowered ATOM 230 (single core 1.6Ghz) CPU. I really like the idea of the big brother with the ATOM 330 (dual core 1.6Ghz) CPU but it has the pricier $330 wallet sapping.

Lifehack.com has a good walk through of setting up the Acer with XMBC and credits burgemaster with the details.

The Network Media Tank community has come together and through Niels has generated a significant upgrade to the Popcorn Hour iPod app.

Performance is great and it has a lot of changes. I did rearrange the buttons and did a bit of add/delete. Here is the control screen. The real advantage is the music, video, image navigation – both on an internal HDD as well as a network sources via explicit connection (SAMBA, NFS, etc.) as well as interrogation (like a UPnP).

I picked up a used ReadyNAS 1100 to precede my ReadyNAS NV+. It won’t give me an extra bedroom or more kitchen space but it will keep track of my electronic document storage, email, music, videos, and photos with plenty of room to spare.

In reality, the 1100 is an older unit than my ReadyNAS NV+. However, it has two advantages for the farmhouse project. First, it is a 1U rack mount unit so it will go into the equipment room and completely out of sight and sound of the residence. Second, it is an 8 terabyte until ! Of course, 8TB with RAID5 redundancy means only 6TB of usable storage but that is a lot more than my current 2.1TB of usable storage.

My plan is to to make the 1100 the primary "on all the time" unit and then do weekly backups of primary data to the NV+. The NV+ will only power up once each week for a few hours to accomplish the backups (probably using rsync or something similar). In addition to my personal and work files, PC backups, and all of the documentation for the farmhouse project, the "primary data" will also include all of my photography – especially as I start to digitize nearly 15 years of 35mm photography from my time over seas in China, Japan, Singapore, and Borneo, as well as my travels around the USA visiting family and friends.

I was curious so I did some digging to understand what’s inside the 1100. I had to chuckle at what I found. The ReadyNAS units run a trimmed down embedded instance of Linux. In addition to the file storage operating system and some utilities, end users can install a few addons. All of this gets stored in "flash memory". The ReadyNAS 1100 specs say it has 256Mg of flash memory. When you see a picture of the system board, you may be surprised at how that "256 MB of flash storage is installed" – it’s a USB FLASH DRIVE !

The USB flash drive is clearly visible on the left of the photo. The 512MB of RAM is a standard laptop DIMM located near the middle of the photo.

I did not fall off the face of the earth. Nor did I fall into a batch of quick drying tile mortar. I still have all of my fingers and toes.

I’ve been spending about 4 hours every weeknight and most of the weekend trying to get projects finished at the farmhouse. The reality is that about 5 projects are "more done" than they use to be but nothing feels like it is ready to be scratched off the to-do list.

The floors were installed in the residence (other than the tile in the wetroom). I’m not happy with the quality of the installation and I think I am s*****d on that one. The biggest issue is that they did a sucky job with the main seam in the living room and is show SOOOO badly I don’t know what to do. I’ve been told it will "tighten up" so I’m giving it tens days before I become a clear and present PITA. (picture to follow in the next couple of days.)

The tiling job in the wetroom continues but at a glacier pace. Measuring from the floor up, there is the bottom one foot I was told to leave until last, then there is four feet of the field color. There there is the accent stripe (tiled on a 45 degree angle <oye>. I still have three more feet above that and then the floor and then that last one foot. Oh yeah … and all of the grout. I figure that’s four more nights plus a Saturday. (picture of the progress to follow in the next couple of days.)

I wanted the old-house look so I purchased 5/4" x 4" stock from the lumber yard. This stuff is far from budget minded. Unfortunately, it was all wrong. The wood turned out to be only 3-1/2" wide (something I should have realized) but worse than that, it was 4-3/16" thick – that’s 6/4 stock ! So now I have 160 board feet of the stuff in my lumber racks for some other project. It will make a nice top for a vanity or side table. It’s not hardwood but it has nice grain and it *IS* thick !

The final trim around all of the doors will be 3/4" x 4-1/2" wit ha bead detail on the inside edge. I decided to save some time and bought pre-primed. I’ll run it all through the router table today to add the detail, then start cutting it to fit each door. I’ll mark it all since I want to give the pieces a coat of paint before it goes up. (At least you know what I’m doing all day <ugh>)

There’s still some electrical to finish; the AC has not been hooked up; the plumber can’t do his thing until the wetroom and kitchen are ready; there is still a punch list on the steel; the front porch and landscaping are non-existent and will remain that way for at least a couple more months; and the spiral staircase won’t get installed until after the occupancy permit because (1) it isn’t required; and (2) it needs to go through the paint shop for primer and final color.

Random …

• Zen put on some weight, I lost some weight
• I have a business trip this week so will lose 2 or 3 nights work on the tiling
• a 3600 sq ft shop feels small when you have so many unfinished projects and everything is still being stored on the floor (I can’t even get a car inside at the moment)
• the week brought us rain, rain, thunderstorms, clouds, thunderstorms, the 3 H’s, cool-sunny-dry-windy … the weather men got every day wrong !
• Wallops had to scrub the Minotaur I rocket launch three times (yes, the Eastern Shore has it’s own full scale space vehicle launch facility)
• the Popcorn Hour got a replacement drive so it’s back up and running
• my employer has asked I start a "business oriented" blog – it wont’ take any content from since I don’t talk about that kind of work on this blog although, I may occasionally reference one blog from the other
• Dinner last night was Chicken and garlic Alfredo over garden pasta with brussels sprouts

So there you have it. One post for a week’s worth of content. It doesn’t help me get to the magical 1000 post milestone but at least you know I still care enough to write Oh, and for this to truly have been a roundup, it should have been posted by Saturday <doh!>