Just thought I’d drop a quick picture of the current version of XBMC running under Hitcher’s Alaska Revisited Mod skin….
Archive for November, 2010
I’m really not sure if this is pure genius or utter vapourware madness…..
http://www.grippity.com/site/products.html
Hope someone gets one for review ASAP!
Well it had to happen… after blogging that the XBMC build was working fine, guess what happened? Yup – has now decided for no apparent reason, to stop playing back any content at all. Now it gives me the busy icon, the screen goes black, the XServer ‘x’ cursor appears and then the XBMC splash screen appears.
It looks like playing video (and even video that played last week) is restarting XBMC.
Oh well. Back to the forum…..
Update
I’ve been digging around on the XBMC forum and it looks like the problem lies with the .asoundrc file. I did alter this to try and get the system sounds working on the Tv. Looks like the recent Dharma RC1 update corrupted this file.
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?p=649378
Update 2
Well I renamed the .asoundrc file, restarted the XBMC box and it all worked again! happy happy happy!
Been meaning to say that I love the HTC Wildfire… once I got hold of a version that actually worked (thank you play.com). Part of me wishes I could have found the cash to get the HTC Desire, but hey the only 2 things that haven’t worked are the new Skype trial and the first release of Angry Birds. The former appears to be buggy as hell and caused shed loads of issues on friends Desires. The latter has now been patched and works.
Well I built a version of XBMC based on Ubuntu 10.04 with the latest Dharma Beta. Added Hitcher’s minimal Alaska skin, dropped a load of Movie, TV, Picture and Music backdrops on and away we went.
There’s been a few issues with the remote…. I’m using the old Xbox DVD IR via USB with my Harmony 785 remote and it sometimes decides to ignore the button presses. It almost seems that if it decides that it doesn’t want to work, nothing I do will convince it to play nice.
I didn’t get here without a few diversions.
I DID try the MythBuntu installation and added XBMC on top, but it was a bit too slow to start up and open XBMC. While I’m not asking for professional CE device start up speeds, I know that turning on the box and then having enough time to go and make a cup of tea isn’t really acceptable. That left me thinking that all I really wanted was the recording capabilities of MythTV and the ability to setup recordings via a web page……
So a MythTV backend with no front end, perhaps that’s the solution? Installation was simple, clean Ubuntu 10.04 minimal installation, XBMC, bit of ALSA, bit of USB – job done. Now add MythTV backend…. done…. configuration…. damn!
The box doesn’t have a window server, it uses some XBMC window magic, so I couldn’t access the MythTV back end setup….. there’s supposed to be a way to do it remotely, but every method I tried failed. So I again admitted defeat and uninstalled the MythTV back end.
Still determined to have some kind of recording capability – there’s a Hauppage Nova t-500 card in the box…… damn it!
Finally I went back to VDR that comes with Ubuntu and actually got it working, complete with simple web admin…. Then in the best tradition of my ignorance, I decided to replace the Ubuntu repo version of VDR with the yaVDR repo. At that point I still had a working VDR (I think), but no way of getting to it….. no WebAdmin would work….
I’ve uninstalled VDR and left the box alone….. perhaps I should just wait until the PVR Branch is officially released!?
Still, loving XBMC on the big screen though!
twistednix's 