XBMC on the Acer Revo

As I wrote a month ago, one of my trainees put up with my stubbornness to put XBMC on said Acer Aspire Revo. Now, initially he put the Live Edition onto it, which didn’t really fly with me. I’m usually the CLI guy, so I needed to install it myself (again). Since I wanted to use the VDPAU features the later GeForce cards offer (and the Revo has such a graphics cad), I had to install the current development builds (you know — I love bleeding edge!)

At first, I was struggling with how to switch the rendering to VDPAU, but after looking through the various settings menus, I figured it out 😛

The next things on my list we’re:

1. Get the TechniSat USB IR receiver/TechniSat IR remote working with XBMC
2. Get a better looking user interface
3. Get cross fading working

1. Since there aren’t many USB IR receivers available to purchase, I went ahead an bought a TechniSat USB IR receiver. Shortly afterwards I figured, that I might need the remote too.

After all my stuff arrived I spent about the evenings of one work week and one whole weekend figuring out this damn remote and it’s keys. But nada .. Nothing appeared in the output of irw or mode2. After googling for the problem (and coming up with just stupid answers), I went ahead and installed inputlirc. After that, I simply turned of the box and carried it back to work the next day.

When I initially showed my trainee the box and asked him to figure out why the remote wasn’t working, he was like “WTF ? Are you serious ?“. After about an hour I went back to see what progress he had made, and he was like “Dude, it just works .. don’t ask me how“.

To get this damn remote working, you need the following:

• configuration for the TechniSat TS35 remote as /etc/lirc/lircd.conf
• hardware settings for lirc as /etc/lirc/hardware.conf
• The package inputlirc and it’s configuration file as /etc/default/inputlirc
• Lircmap.xml (see Lircmap.xml.help for the real keymapping) and Keymap.xml in ~/.xbmc/userdata

After placing all these files, I can program my Harmony (a bit strangely I admit) to the various keys of the TechniSat remote 😮

2. I don’t have anything against the default user interface of XBMC, but it really isn’t all there is .. So I went looking. Looked at about fifteen different skins, until I found Stark. Now, Stark is about everything I’ve been looking for.

3. The next thing on my list was to get simultaneous output working. If you do cross fading (only to name an example), you need the ability to stream two audio tracks through a single device. If you remember back two years, ALSA still wasn’t capable of doing that either way. A short time later, the ALSA developers introduced DMix. Now, after fiddling a bit with it, I think I have that too!

I still need to work out a few flaws in the keymap, but once that is resolved, I’m probably completely happy 😀