A new XBMC box

A couple of months ago I was at LinuxTag in Berlin with the friends from VIdeoLAN and we shared a booth with the XBMC project. It was interesting to see the newest version of XBMC running, and I decided that it was time for me to get a new XBMC box — last time I used XBMC was on my AppleTV and while it was not strictly disappointing it was not terrific either after a while.

At any rate, we spoke about what options are available nowadays to make a good XBMC set up, and while the RaspberryPi is all the rage nowadays, my previous experience with the platform made it a no-go. It also requires you to find a place where to store your data (the USB support on the Pi is not good for many things) and you most likely will have to re-encode animes to the Right Format™ so that the RPi VideoCore can properly decode them: anything that can’t be hardware-accelerated will not play on such a limited hardware.

The alternative has been the Intel NUC (Next Unit of Computing), which Intel sells in pre-configured “barebone” kits, some of which include wifi antennas, 2.5” disk bays, and a CIR (Consumer Infrared Receiver) that allows you to use a remote such as the one for the XBox 360 to control the unit. I decided to look into the options and I settled on the D54250WYKH which has a Core i5 CPU, space for both a wireless card (I got the Intel 7260 802.11ac which is dual-radio and supports the new 11ac protocol, even though my router is not 11ac yet), and a mSATA SSD (I got a Transcend 128GB one), as well the 2.5” bay that allows me to use a good old spinning-rust harddrive to store the bulk of the data.

Be careful and don’t repeat my mistake! I originally ordered a very cool Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB HDD but while it is a 2.5” HDD, it does not fit properly in the provided cradle; the same problem used to happen with the first series of 1TB HDDs on PlayStation 3s. I decided to keep the HDD and bring it with me to Ireland, as I don’t otherwise have a 2TB HDD, instead I opted for a HGST 1.5TB HDD (no link for this one as I bought it at Fry’s the same day I picked up the rest, if nothing else because I had no will to wait, and also because I forgot I needed a keyboard).

While I could have just put OpenELEC on the device, I decided instead to install my trusted Gentoo — a Core i5 with 16GB of RAM and a good SSD is well in its ability to run it. And since I was finally setting something up that needs (for myself) to turn on very quickly, I decided to give systemd a go (especially as Robbins is now considered a co-maintainer for OpenRC which drains all my will to keep using it). The effect has been stunning, but there are a few issues that needs to be ironed out; for instance, as far as I can tell, there is no unit for rngd which means that both my laptop (now converted to systemd) and the device have no entropy, even though they both have the rdrand instruction; I’ll try to fix this lack myself.

Another huge problem for me has been getting the audio to work; while I’ve been told by the XBMC people that the NUC are perfectly well supported, I couldn’t for the sake of me get the audio to work for days. At the end it was Alexander Patrakov who pointed out to intel_iommu=on,igfx_off as a kernel option to get it to work (kernel bug #67321 still unfixed). So if you have no HDMI output on your NUC, that’s what you have to do!

Speaking about XBMC and Gentoo, the latest version as of last week (which was not the latest upstream version, as a new one got released exactly while I was installing the box), seem to force you to install FFmpeg over libav – I honestly felt a bit sorry for the developers of XBMC at LinuxTag while they were trying to tell me how the multi-threaded h264 decoder from FFmpeg is great… Anton, who wrote it, is a libav developer! – but even after you do that, it seems like it does not link it in, preferring a bundled copy of it instead. Which also doesn’t seem to build support for multithread (uh?). This is something that I’ll have to look into once I’m back in Dublin.

Other than that, there isn’t much to say; the one remaining big issue is to figure out how to properly have XBMC start up at boot without nasty autologin hacks on systemd. And of course finding a better way than using a transmission user to start the Transmission daemon, or at least find a better way to share the downloads with XBMC itself. Probably separating the XBMC and Transmission users is a good idea.

Expect more posts on what’s going on with my XBMC box in the future, and take this one as a reference about the NUC audio issue.