revo died - want an apple based option to get XBMC on my tv again!

snow patrol · 2 Dec 2012 at 11:44

hi all, used to have a pretty sweet setup with a revo 3610 under my tv, which was networked to my synology diskstation with all my media on it. The revo ran xbmc and worked great, although was slightly slow in the menus etc.

However, the revo is dead. I'll really love to get a mac mini under there for xbmc, but i suspect that's over kill, right? So what are my options? Jailbroken ATV2 only does 720p so no good there...

if i did get a mac mini do i need to get a HDMI enabled one (which seem to be only the slightly more recent and pricey ones) or can i just use an adaptor and get exactly the same quality? The hdmi would feed into my amp obviously..

any thoughts? Stop me from just bunging £500 odd on a mac mini JUST to use for xbmc...

hank · 2 Dec 2012 at 12:32

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18465037

snow patrol · 2 Dec 2012 at 17:21

thanks - that looks rather promising i must say...

bam0 · 2 Dec 2012 at 20:54

If you want to go really cheap have you considered using a Raspberry Pi? I have one hooked up to a TV, they support HDMI-CEC out of the box, assuming your TV/amp support it too. I'm using Raspbmc and it'll happily play 1080p H264.

z0mbi3 · 3 Dec 2012 at 11:20

If you thought the menus were slow on the Revo then you'd be in for a huge surprise with an Apple TV. Out of curiosity how much ram did you have in the Revo? I noticed a slight lag in mine when it was running 1gb, and none at all with 2gb.

A similar spec nettop of some description should do the job.

snow patrol · 3 Dec 2012 at 12:33

hi guys, i think the pulse 8 looks like a good option. I had 2 gigs in the revo, but my xbmc library was huuuggge. It only lagged a little bit on the neon skin. Not a great deal, but compared to say my macbook pro, it felt a bit sluggish.

So it's definitely not worth having 4 gigs instead of 2?

Oh Ed not again. · 3 Dec 2012 at 12:36

I've been using XBMC for about a year on an ATV2, pulling videos off a samba share (time capsule in file share mode) with no problems at all. It's responsive and punchy enough for my needs, bummer it only does 720p but considering it was a £80 purchase that uses 5w of power and doesn't make a peep it's not bad at all.

It's being replaced with a media PC soon, but it'll live on running XBMC upstairs.

z0mbi3 · 3 Dec 2012 at 13:41

snow patrol said:
hi guys, i think the pulse 8 looks like a good option. I had 2 gigs in the revo, but my xbmc library was huuuggge. It only lagged a little bit on the neon skin. Not a great deal, but compared to say my macbook pro, it felt a bit sluggish.

So it's definitely not worth having 4 gigs instead of 2?

I'm reasonably sure the lag you had in that skin would be due to the cpu. Video playback is done by the gpu, so to have silky smooth video and then jump into the menus and feel choppiness would be expected as those nettops are CPU limited. Ram is cheap so if you were buying it would be silly not to get 4gb, but if you're reusing your Revo's ram then there's no reason to go for more.

I too have a huge library and it doesn't make a dent on 2gb of ram.

Worth noting you can go into system info under the System tab and monitor the memory usage in real time.