I wrote this article up a while back, and since then, I’ve switched to OpenELEC, which really is the way to go for an XBMC-only computer setup. However, in case it helps anybody, here’s what I was doing last fall.
It can be tough when you’re trying to get something working under a specific set of conditions, each with little idiosyncrasies that don’t quite fit with the rest of the forum posts you’re able to google up. Such was the case with me over the summer. Now that I’ve more or less figured it out, I’d like to collect what I was able to find that worked in the hopes that the next person will have a slightly easier time.
I’ve loved XBMC since I first heard about it a few years ago, and I’m constantly trying to improve and optimize my HTPC setup. Over the past year the computer serving as HTPC has changed faces (and housings), but it has always been a Windows 7 Pro PC playing media from internal hard drives that boots to XBMC instead of the Windows desktop*.
A while back, that computer, Tess, had a bit of a conniption fit and the Windows installation got knocked out of alignment. The ATI driver wasn’t loading properly, and for some reason it needs to be active to “overscan” the video output by 15% so it fills the whole TV screen (this is not the case with nVidia card/driver pairs, in my experience). This situation gave me the impetus to further develop my HTPC setup: Splitting functions into a computer running FreeNAS for file storage, and a computer running XBMC Live for media playback.
The FreeNAS installation went surprisingly well, but unfortunately, the current XBMC Live CD doesn’t support hardware acceleration on my ATI video card (Radeon HD 5450). At first, playing any sort of video file caused XBMC to crash and restart. Changing to “basic shaders” in the setting fixed the crashing, but the computer still had a hard time playing 1080p video, with huge numbers of dropped frames and playback so choppy the audio got out of sync. Under Windows 7 with the exact same setup, the videos would play fine.
I still wanted a computer that ran a minimal, XBMC-centric OS, so I decided to try getting it to work on a minimal Ubuntu install. I try not to be a Linux noob, but I am a Linux newb, so I began by following this guide. I kept running into trouble getting xserver to work and launch XBMC, and after a number of unsuccessful attempts, was able to get things working by following the steps outlined in this post, starting with an Ubuntu minimal install instead of Ubuntu server (as is used in the post).
In my case, I had to run sudo startx, and in the resulting terminal window, sudo amdcccle to bring up the Catalyst control center and enable the 15% overscan. I noticed that the command startx didn’t work to launch XBMC in this setup, but xinit did. I used this startup script and substituted startx for xinit xbmc, and now XBMC loads just fine as soon as the computer boots.
I’m currently running an in-development version of XBMC, but I am successfully playing smooth 1080p video from a FreeNAS server to an XBMC-only box connected to my TV. So far so good; hopefully it won’t be too much of a pain to switch over to the next final XBMC release when the time comes.
*Windows users: This is a relatively easy tweak to make if you’re on Win7 Pro, using the Group Policy Editor to replace the explorer.exe shell with xbmc.exe as described in this guide. From there, you can hit Ctl+Shift+Esc and manually launch explorer.exe from Task Manager if you need access to the “regular” Windows environment. It’s pretty elegant if you don’t want to work with Linux or Live CDs, or have Windows software you want to use on the computer.