Comment posted My Personal Revo 3610 Set Up that works well by Brian.
Paul, thanks so much for your work. This website has helped tremendously. I love these little boxes. I’ve cut the cable cord and haven’t looked back.
As for upgrades I’ve gone to 4GB (might be overkill) and added a 320GB HDD. The faster & bigger HDD makes a noticeable difference. Also I recommend the HDhomerun dual tuner dvr. I love the fact that because it works thru your router you can watch it on any computer on your network.
For streaming I mostly use Hulu. And while boxee’s interface is groundbreaking, I find it a bit maddening at times. Using netflix streaming there’s sometimes an issue with audio sync, but I think that’s netflix’s fault not the Revo’s.
Anyone having choppy video, I can vouch that turning Aero ON makes a huge difference. It’s kind of counter-intuitive but it works so who am I to argue.
Mike, I’m bummed to hear about the problems with MLB.tv. I was looking forward to watching the Phils in HD this summer. Have you tried it with Aero turned on? Does it help?
Brian also commented
- Mike Collins,
I shelled out for MLB.tv today. In IE/FF I was having no luck getting it to run smoothly.
After hours of noodling I was able to get it to look darn near perfect. What you have to do is download the latest Boxee Beta 0.9.21.11421. Click on early release from the download tab. Once you get that running, use the MLB app. Now you’ll lose some of the extra features (player tracker, highlights) but you’ll get a hd live (or video for finished games) stream.
Hope this helps.
Go Phils!
- Mike,
Are you using media player or media center? That could make a huge difference.
I think it might be your router or bad ethernet cable. My HDhomerun and Revo are wired thru my router and I can watch recorded shows in media center while 2 different shows are recording. There’s a ever so slight audio blip/static but its barely noticable. I also can watch hulu while something is being recorded without any issues.
Before I picked up the HDHR I had a Hauppauge 950q. It worked but not as well as the HDHR – plus with two tuners you can watch one thing while another records.
Paul,
I’m with BobbyVan. Using a Revo without a tuner you’re missing out on its full capabilities.
- Paul,
It’s a Western Digital Scorpio Black 320gb 7200rpm with a 16mb cache. It made a huge difference. It’s $70 well spent. However, when copying the hard drive I had trouble with the eSata port. I couldn’t get the drive to show up. So I had to do it thru the usb. Anybody else try their eSata?
As for the RAM I’m not sure what speed, I just picked up what crucial.com recommended. I’m gonna guess DDR2 6400/800. I don’t know why the bios is set up to only read 3 gb. Kinda defeats the purpose of 64 bit windows, no?
Also I picked up a $20 Windows Media Center remote (AVS Gear GP-IR01BK) which works okay. Just make sure you replace the batteries. The ones that come with it died within a week but before the went they had a weird death rattle of every button I pushed it would react 2x.
So all told its…
$330 for the Revo
$100 for 4gb (which I should’ve just bought 2gb for $50)
$70 for the 320gb HDD
$50 for the external CD/DVD player
$20 for the remote
$570 Total (plus $130 for the HDHomerun dual tuner makes it 700)Which sounds like alot but that’s only 10 months of cable. After a year or so the system has paid for itself.
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Derek,
I’ve had no issues with ISO playback and screen fitment. If it’s letterbox on the DVD itself, then it’s letter box on Boxee. If it’s full screen 16:9 on the DVD itself, then the ISO plays in boxee the same size.
I would have to say this fluctuation in sizes may be related to what software you are using to rip the DVD files. There are multiple views on some DVD’s and the ripper software can sometimes grab whichever version it feels like during the rip process.
I have no experience with WD TV or the movies you refer to, so I cannot comment on the differences. Post on the boxee forums, maybe one of my Smods or mods will know of something if it’s not the rip software and what files it’s grabbing for screen size.
Thanks a lot for the guide, Paul. Very very helpful.
My experience after following the guide was that I had great playback through Firefox for Hulu and Comedy Central, but terrible choppy playback in Boxee.
After reading through some comments, I found someone who mentioned that enabling Aero helped them. I had disabled it, because that seemed like the intuitive thing to do.
And, I can confirm that *enabling* an Aero theme totally fixed the streaming in Boxee. I now have fantastic playback… for some reason.
If you get a chance to update your post, I’d edit to say Aero *should* be enabled on the 3610. It actually doesn’t work well without it for some unknown reason.
Thanks for the feedback. It’s not a huge concern and probably has more to do with my TV than anything.
I’ve been using Windows Media Center 7, too, and am anxious to integrate my extended collection of ISOs. I know that I can use Mikinho’s Media Center Mount Image app, along with DVDFab Virtual Drive, but Mikinho’s site appears to be down and I can’t find his app anywhere else. Have you had any experience with accessing ISOs inside WMC 7?
AtomicCEO
Yeah, I’d heard that and tested it to be true on my system too. Makes sense once you see what Aero actually does for the GPU.
I thought as you did at one time.
I’ll clarify that bit in my Set Up post. Good idea! Thanks.
Derek,
Sorry, but I don’t use WMC at all, so I’ve had very little use over the years once I decided I did not like the workflow and function.
If there is a plug in to make ISO’s work, give it a try.
I tweeted mikinho to inform of site outage. Reading his tweets over the past few days, he’s had this issue already and fixed it .
Update:
Mikinho tweeted me two links for 32 bit or 64 bit.
mikinho@pauljroberts My VM is corrupt, the hosting company is working on it =/ v1.7 x86-32: http://bit.ly/cFRwXj x86-64: http://www.chi-town.com/mikinho/mount-image-setup-x64-1.7.msiabout 4 hours ago via Chromed Bird
My Revo Forums:
http://www.pauljroberts.com/forum/
Great info! Thanks a lot! I did the installation and everything works except h264.mp4 playback which does not play in neither boxee nor WPC. Any ideas why? Which of the programs above was supposed to include h264 codec?
Alex,
Glad my site helped out! Thanks.
An H264 mp4 file plays natively on Windows Media Player, MPC-HC, Boxee and most any video player. H264 and MP4 requires no additional codec
Your file is either not H264 .mp4 or was encoded with some other off beat codec.
I included files at the bottom of the post that are proper H264 mp4 files. Download one and test it.
Thanks. I did try it with the linked file before but probably did not download it properly. It works now.
However, I still have sporadic problems with Netflix playback despite all the same setup. Every other time (randomly) the playback is very choppy. Then the other time it’s OK. It’s not the inernet – i am consistently getting over 5Mbits/s on speedtest. It seems to be the CPU. Playing neflix in explorer – same proble. So far WMC plays fine. Any ideas?
Alex,
Ok, good to hear.
NFlix? Hmmm, boy. Real frustrating here to. Worked perfectly in HD the first week then went to crap. Seems I have plenty of CPU, but once the playbitrate and the download bit rate both hit 2600 or 3800 it starts to stutter. Did not do it that first week at all. I’m wondering if they are tinkering with the encoding, bandwidth or the player code? I’m not sure. All I know it went to hell real quick and I can’t do anything on my end to get it back. I even turned off all sorts of services and got down to 39 items running and it still would not play. I’ve had to set the browser to 1500 bitrate manually and just deal with how it used to be before HD streams.
WMCenter? I don’t use it, but may have to see if it is using the HD stream or not and how it plays for me. I’ll post back.
We may need to move this to the my forum: http://www.pauljroberts.com/forum/
I have been looking into this solution with Boxee, or a Boxee box, or Sezmi PVR solution, to cut my satellite service and the one thing I would additionally like to integrate is Live OTA HD channels into this HTPC Do you have any thoughts, comments, recommendations about adding a usb tv tuner onto this unit to connect a OTA antenna and DVR recording capabilities, or would a satellite internet solution be a better way to go. I am afraid the added cpu load of the tuner would cause performance issues.
The only way I can sell this to the family is to make it as easy to use and close as possible to our Dish HD DVR setup . I know i can justify the cost in a few months of sat bills, but trying to figure out a smooth interface.
I have been playing with Boxee on another non HTPC right now, and having alot of problems with performance and interface(audio and cant get Hulu to work), so I believe it is not going to be the end all solution, but will be a combo of softwares.
Any advice would be appreciated
Paul:
You can disregard some of my question above – I see this issue with USB tuners has been discussed to death with no final resolution. Seems the Hulu thing and Boxee is also a common problem.
Wondering if a newer Revo is on the way with a bit more horsepower.
Michael,
Please see more on this topic in my forums:
http://www.pauljroberts.com/forum/
Michael,
The new revo I’ve seen on the web but Acer has not confirmed the release other than their Aton/Ion 2 laptop. Nvidia still has to release a video patch driver that helps Windows play Flash with GPU acceleration. I feel that all the other vendors are waiting for this patch to be made BEFORE they all go to market with the Ion 2 boxes. That’s why nothing has been released other than the Zotac Zbox, which is having playback issues without the new driver.
Read more in the forums: http://www.pauljroberts.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=60
I have an Acer Revo 3610. When I try to watch Hulu full screen my TV says no signal. Any thoughts on what might be causing this? I’m wondering if there could be something wrong with the HDMI cable, but I feel like I’m grasping at straws.
I’m also experiencing a stuttering issue when streaming Netflix in HD. Hopefully this is temporary.
Mike,
The no signal issue: Check for good cable connections. Open the Nvidia controller and be sure to set the Revo to HDMI out and select your 720P or 1080p resolution (I recommend 720P). If you have it set to vga…that may be your issue. Update the Nvidia drivers. The new WHQL 257.27 is out now.
Stuttering with Netflix is normal right now. NF is in the midst of tweaking their player, bitrate settings etc. So, be sure to disable the HD opion in the player by clicking the HD tab and uncheck the “allow HD” and it should play in 1500 SD quality like it did before the move to HD streaming a few weeks ago.
Sometimes, when they have the player tweaked right, it will stream HD nicely, but it comes and goes as they tweak it lately.
Hi Paul, My revo 3610 is pretty much set up. I am having one issue with the display though. My TV is 720p (1280 x 720). Its a 50″ samsung. However, when I set 720p as the resolution on my revo, the display on the TV is not fully within the TV screen. In order to get the display correctly within the TV screen I have to reduce the resolution on the revo to 1242 x 696. The recommended resolution on the computer is shows as 1280 x 720. Is there a way out?
John,
You did not state what cable you are using: HDMI or VGA.
Set the revo at 720P. Then adjust the TV settings themselves. Those settings are Normal, cinema, Overscan (try NOT to use that), stretch, or some variant of all of these.
Some older TV’s don’t play well with PC’s even if connected via HDMI. They interpret the signal oddly and make it a strange size. Try to use the TV’s format settings I outlined.
Thanks Paul. I have an HDMI connection. I did as you said. Set the revo resolution to 720p and adjusted the TV resolution. The TV screen was with the aspect ratio 16:9. When I changed it to “Just Scan” the screen fit well. Thanks.
Hi John,
Thanks for the excellent start-up guide. I have just purchased the Revo R3610 which I presume is the slightly newer model as it comes with the 500GB HDD and 4GB RAM. I am pleased to say that your guide has made my machine into a Media Center to be proud of.
Whilst the Revo won’t hook onto the back of my Sony 40″ TV, it is more than small enough to sit proudly down in the TV Stand. I can now finally get rid of my PC Tower
One question though, I have a large collection of TV Shows already on my NAS Drive, but Boxee has some issues with collating them, what other programs can you recommend?
David,
Thanks for the props and glad my blog was able to help get you going.
Your model is the usual for the UK as the USA models have only 2 gb ram and 160 gb drives.
Boxee has had some NAS issues. I’ve not trouble shot any of those issues on the Boxee forums, I’ll ask my fellow Super Mods on the Boxee forums to see what some of the solutions may be.
Other media center programs? Ahhh, most need too much power to run and don’t offer what boxee does. I’d say just use WMC that is already on the machine. But, I’ll see what I can find out about getting the Nas to work
What model is it? Network connected or USB?
My Revo Forums:
http://www.pauljroberts.com/forum/
Hi Paul,
One more question for you. Is the HDD in revo swapable? Is it a 2.5″ or 3.5″ HDD? Can I replace it with a 1TB internal HD?
It is 2.5 SATA. You can run any size HDD you want..either traditional platter style or a newer SSD.