Swapping Hard Drive in Acer Revo

The Acer Aspire Revo has a lot of potential for a home media player but the 160gb hard drive won’t be large enough for everybody.
I spotted a special offer on a Iomega Prestige 500gb Portable Hard Drive which contains (in my case) a Seagate Momentus 5400.6 drive, model ST9500325AS .
I already [...]

XBMC With VDPAU and iPlayer

There’s an interesting article on the How to do something differently… blog about getting VDPAU working with iPlayer under Linux with the SVN build of XBMC. I’ll be sure to look into it some more when I install Ubuntu onto my Revo.

Opening the Acer Aspire Revo

There’s a useful page on opening the Acer Aspire Revo here. Will come in useful for when I add an extra 1GB RAM to the existing 1GB, or maybe swapping the hard drive for a larger one.

List of Media Centre Software for Windows and Linux

Here is a list of free Media Centre Software for Linux and Windows.
Windows Media Center Software

Windows Media Center – http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vista/features/media-center.aspx (supports TV cards)
XBMC – http://xbmc.org
Moovida – http://www.moovida.com
MediaPortal – http://www.team-mediaportal.com (supports TV cards)
Freevo – http://freevo.sourceforge.net (supports TV cards)
GB-PVR – http://www.gbpvr.com (supports TV cards)
MeediOS – http://www.meedios.com (supports TV cards)

Linux Media Center Software

XBMC – http://xbmc.org
Boxee – http://www.boxee.tv
Moovida [...]

Installing Windows 7 on Acer Aspire Revo

Here are some instructions for installing Windows 7 RC onto the Acer Aspire Revo.
1. Backup Drivers
Using “Revobuild”, take a backup of the drivers on the recovery partition – they are copied to a USB stick. Might come in useful later!
2. Partitioning
Here is how I partitioned the 160GB hard drive (Using “GParted Live” on a USB [...]

Power Consumption of Acer Aspire Revo

My Acer Aspire Revo R3600 arrived yesterday. Here are the specifications: -

1.6GHz Intel Atom 230 CPU
1GB DDR2 RAM
160GB hard disk
Nvidia GeForce 9400M graphics
HDMI, D-SUB out
eSATA
6 x USB
4-in-1 card reader
Gigabit Ethernet
802.11bg WLAN
Linux
Size: 30mm x 180mm x 180mm

I’ve installed Windows 7 (more details in another post) and done a quick test of the power consumption. As I’ve [...]

Streaming HD Video to Xbox 360

I’ve been experimenting with encoding HD videos using EncodeHD and then streaming them to an Xbox 360 via TwonkyVision from my QNAP TS-101. The QNAP TS-101 is a small NAS device with 64mb RAM so I think its a safe assumption that no transcoding is being done.
I first took a sample video from here and [...]

Ubuntu Wallpapers

To install some nice wallpapers on Ubuntu, run the following command: -
sudo apt-get install peace-wallpapers tropic-wallpapers ubuntustudio-wallpapers blubuntu-wallpapers

Xbox 360 Multi-Player Games

Here are some good Xbox 360 XBLA games that I have identified may be worth looking at. Most of them are also multi-player (either local or via Xbox Live)
Xbox Live Arcade
Catan (800 points)
Sensible World of Soccer (800 points)
Peggle (800 points)
Bomberman Live (800 points)
Small Arms (400 points)
Uno (400 points)
Tetris Splash (800 points)
Texas Hold’Em (800 points)
Super Street [...]

Dropbox

I know its been around for ages, but I’ve finally got around to trying “dropbox”. If you haven’t heard, it allows you to synchronise folders across different PC’s. How it works is you install the software on your different PC’s (work laptop, home PC) and then you have a folder called “My Dropbox”. When you [...]