Asus Eee Box?

[flyboy]

I've looked around to find a networked media player but can't find the perfect out-of-the-box solution. So here's a thought: why not get an Asus Eee Box (http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=24&l2=165) loaded with Linux MCE. Has anyone tried it? I'd like to use it to display divx/xvid and other video files from my NAS on my tv, play music, etc. Any thoughts on wheter it has the processing power to display without interruptions?

Thanks!

[totallymaxed]

I've looked around to find a networked media player but can't find the perfect out-of-the-box solution. So here's a thought: why not get an Asus Eee Box (http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=24&l2=165) loaded with Linux MCE. Has anyone tried it? I'd like to use it to display divx/xvid and other video files from my NAS on my tv, play music, etc. Any thoughts on wheter it has the processing power to display without interruptions?

Thanks!

We're using is as an MD very successfully (you need to update the boot image to include the NIC driver... see http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/R8168)... it works great for UI1 & Ui2 + Overlay. As long as you dont want a integral optical drive or any TV cards it would be possible to use the Eee Box as a Core too.

All the best

Andrew

[wombiroller]

I've looked around to find a networked media player but can't find the perfect out-of-the-box solution. So here's a thought: why not get an Asus Eee Box (http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=24&l2=165) loaded with Linux MCE. Has anyone tried it? I'd like to use it to display divx/xvid and other video files from my NAS on my tv, play music, etc. Any thoughts on wheter it has the processing power to display without interruptions?

Thanks!

We're using is as an MD very successfully (you need to update the boot image to include the NIC driver... see http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/R8168)... it works great for UI1 & Ui2 + Overlay. As long as you dont want a integral optical drive or any TV cards it would be possible to use the Eee Box as a Core too.

All the best

Andrew

Hey Andrew - don't suppose you have had it running @720p with Ui2 + Overlay?? If so - does it cope well?

Cheers,
WR.

[colinjones]

flyboy - LMCE is free and open source to download as software and use as you will, sell, do whatever the hell you like with - except you are not allowed to bundle it with hardware as a complete solution without a licence from Pluto. That's what people like Andrew's (Totallymaxed) company does in the UK.

[totallymaxed]

I've looked around to find a networked media player but can't find the perfect out-of-the-box solution. So here's a thought: why not get an Asus Eee Box (http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=24&l2=165) loaded with Linux MCE. Has anyone tried it? I'd like to use it to display divx/xvid and other video files from my NAS on my tv, play music, etc. Any thoughts on wheter it has the processing power to display without interruptions?

Thanks!

We're using is as an MD very successfully (you need to update the boot image to include the NIC driver... see http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/R8168)... it works great for UI1 & Ui2 + Overlay. As long as you dont want a integral optical drive or any TV cards it would be possible to use the Eee Box as a Core too.

All the best

Andrew

Hey Andrew - don't suppose you have had it running @720p with Ui2 + Overlay?? If so - does it cope well?

Cheers,
WR.

Hi Wombiroller,

The ASUS Eee Box will not currently handle UI2 + Alpha blending but will deliver UI2 + Overlay at 720p and even at 1080i very nicely.

All the best

Andrew

[chrisbirkinshaw]

Do you manage to spin down the HD somehow? Or remove it? Might be good to keep it in for suspend to swap. On that note, do you know if suspend works?!

Chris

[totallymaxed]

Do you manage to spin down the HD somehow? Or remove it? Might be good to keep it in for suspend to swap. On that note, do you know if suspend works?!

Chris

No. We currently leave the internal 160gb drive in place as the end customer then has the option to use either XP (and the Windows Orbiter) or the onbard 'instant-on' Linux installation ie 'FlashGate'. The Eee PC consumes about 26W when in operation with the internal drive spun up and the WiFi powered and playing back either a DVD stream or a TV stream. So its a very low power device anyway.

All the best

Andrew

[chrisbirkinshaw]

Could always slip a hdparm -Y /dev/xxx into the init scripts somewhere. Actually this might be a nice configuration option "Spin down MD HDD after boot".

Though actually now I remember that LMCE scans all the hard disks quite often. I once tried to get my media drives on the core to sleep but saw the drive scanning processes wake them up every 10 mins or so. It would be great if there was a Green mode though, where all disk and media scanning was only done once a day or on request. Then you could keep piling disks into your core and not worry about the energy bills.

[wombiroller]

Hi Wombiroller,

The ASUS Eee Box will not currently handle UI2 + Alpha blending but will deliver UI2 + Overlay at 720p and even at 1080i very nicely.

All the best

Andrew

Thanks Andrew :-)

[totallymaxed]

Could always slip a hdparm -Y /dev/xxx into the init scripts somewhere. Actually this might be a nice configuration option "Spin down MD HDD after boot".

Though actually now I remember that LMCE scans all the hard disks quite often. I once tried to get my media drives on the core to sleep but saw the drive scanning processes wake them up every 10 mins or so. It would be great if there was a Green mode though, where all disk and media scanning was only done once a day or on request. Then you could keep piling disks into your core and not worry about the energy bills.

If you have not added the ASUS's internal drive when it gets detected then I can see any reason why forcing it to low=power mode would be a problem. How much energy would be saved I don't know. If I get some time next week I'll look into that an report back ;-)

I agree some kind of 'Green' mode would be a good direction to go in - maybe allowing you to set a range of options in Web Admin so you could set the level of energy saving you needed. However I suspect that to achieve anything like this would require some pretty widespread and very fundamental changes to the architecture of the system... nevertheless its still an area that I would say warrants some effort by the community. If its something your interested in why dont you kick-off a thread in the Developer area of the Forum and see if you can pull together some people interested in getting involved in thinking this through in more detail (it will need someone with a deep understanding of how the 'guts' of LinuxMCE work). This is not something that can be 'duct taped' on ;-)

All the best

Andrew

[Dale_K]

We're using is as an MD very successfully (you need to update the boot image to include the NIC driver... see http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/R8168)... it works great for UI1 & Ui2 + Overlay. As long as you dont want a integral optical drive or any TV cards it would be possible to use the Eee Box as a Core too.

All the best

Andrew

I'm attempting to follow the instructions on the R8168 drivers Wiki page above but when I get to the patch<r8168.diff part it tells me: 

can't find file to patch at input line 3
Perhaps you should have used the -p or --strip option?
The text leading up to this was:
--------------------------
|--- drivers/net/r8169.c.orig   2008-09-05 17:07:29.000000000 +0300
|+++ drivers/net/r8169.c        2008-09-04 23:49:51.000000000 +0300
--------------------------
File to patch:                     


I have no idea what file to tell it to patch.  Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Dale

[colinjones]

The instructions didn't include details on how to set the two files up that the patch is expecting. The patch includes those file names as you can see. The easy way around it is to explicitly tell patch which file. Do

man patch

and look at the options, you will see how to force it.

[Dale_K]

The problem is, I have no idea what file.

[colinjones]

You want to patch the r8169.c file with the diff file you created, can't remember if anything else was needed, but this should force it:

from the directory that r8169.c is in... (assuming the diff file you created is called file.diff)

patch r8169.c file.diff

If you were to look at r8169.c before and after the process, several pages down you will see the PCI aliases mentioned in the wiki article. After the patch you will see a "//" comment in front of the 8168 PCI alias. That is the only change (so you could just do it manually!) The idea is to stop the R8169 driver thinking it is able to drive an R8168 chip, so that the new R8168 driver that you installed gets a chance to take over... if that makes sense...