Acer Aspire Revo 3700 and XBMC

The latest piece of equipment for home theater puzzle is an Acer AspireRevo AR3700. It's a very small nettop PC that can easily be hooked up to a TV using HDMI.

My plan was to load the amazing XBMC application onto the device, point XBMC at my library of ripped movies, and then enjoy watching. I also wanted to keep Windows 7 installed in case I needed other Windows applications. By the way, for those who already know Google TV and Apple TV you can think of XBMC as a much better application for playing back content on your home network. Maybe someone will port it to Google TV one day.

After cabling up the Revo 3700 I spent some time removing all the extra software Acer had loaded onto the system. Then I ran windows update and loaded XBMC. I configured XBMC to use files on an SMB server and started playing some video.

It worked but the video stuttered quite a bit.

I worried that the Revo did not have enough horsepower to play 1080p video so I put some video on a USB drive and connected that to the Revo. XBMC played that video perfectly.

I should mention at this point that I was using a wired connection over power-line ethernet. My wireless doesn't reach into this room. Next I tried to copy a file from the network to the Revo. I noticed that even though the transfer was about 30Mbps average it was not consistent. There were lots peaks and valleys.

I did more testing and eventually concluded that there was some issue with the Revo's wired network adapter. This sent me looking for drivers. I found and updated the software using the latest Realtek network drivers. The driver install didn't go very well. It failed during the first update but after I rebooted the system the new drivers installed correctly.

Went back to XBMC and my SMB video files played perfectly.

If you haven't used XBMC I recommend it.

It's a harder call on the Acer Revo 3700 box itself. The R3700 is a good size, very quiet, fast enough to run XBMC, has the right ports (mostly an HDMI and USB for me), but it just doesn't have a lot of horsepower. I find that while XBMC runs well it isn't as responsive as I'd like it to be. There is some lag when bringing up menus and browsing through videos. There is a whole slew of devices (Lenovo, Shuttle, etc.) around this price point and I can't definitively say that this is best deal for price / performance. Also, it doesn't just work out of the box because you need install updated drivers and remove bloat-ware. Bottom line, is that the Revo is good enough but it's not inspirational.