Asus Eee Box + XBMC = pretty nice media center

I got an Asus Eee Box off woot.com a week or two ago, and have spent the last few days getting XBMC up and running on it. It is now plugged into my TV via HDMI, and working pretty well.

The pros:

• It’s cheap.
• It doesn’t consume much power.
• It’s very quiet.
• It’s got a full OS, so unlike the Popcorn Hour I’ve been using for the last few years, it can run real apps with interfaces that are pleasant as well as functional.

The cons:

• It came with XP Home as the OS
• It’s got a relatively crummy ATI Radeon Mobility HD 4530 GPU.
• While it has a wireless mouse and keyboard, they’re RF-based, so IR remote controls require an additional USB adapter.

I went with XBMC over Boxee as my media center app because XBMC is a lot more customizable, and I find Boxee’s “We’re going to haphazardly combine online and local content + stuff from our featured content providers” UI to be pretty wretched. Boxee’s “support” for Hulu and Netflix just isn’t that compelling for me, and their transcode-on-the-fly method of presenting the video makes for a significant reduction in quality.

As it stands, I now have a pretty nice media center. It plays all my music and standard-def video just fine, and it’s great to have all the program, movie, artist, and song metadata and artwork that it scrapes from sites like IMDB, TVDB, and AllMusic.

The biggest challenges I ran into during the setup and configuration process were related to drivers. The video drivers that shipped with the PC were more than a year out of date, and were just about useless for playing any kind of video. When I initially checked the AMD/ATI site, they said “Sorry, we can’t provide driver updates, go to your OEM’s site.” The drivers available on Asus’s site were about a week newer than the ancient ones I already had. Further googling turned up a different ATI site, and lo and behold, they have much newer drivers for my chipset. Getting them installed required some wrangling with XP, but now even 720p h.264-encoded MKV video files play pretty well.

The other struggle was with my remote. I got a cheap-ass Windows Media Center remote for the sole purpose of using it to train my Logitech Harmony universal remote. Trouble is, XP Home has no drivers for the remote’s USB IR receiver. After trying a bunch different hacks suggested by the internets, I finally hit upon the solution of plugging the IR receiver into my work laptop (which runs XP Pro), letting it install, and then copying the irbus.inf file to the Eee Box. Hey presto! Now it works.

So I’m pretty happy with this setup. All that being said, I don’t buy the “Who needs cable TV anymore?” posts that litter sites like Lifehacker. XBMC, Boxee, Windows Media Center, SageTV, MythTV—these are all great products. It’s awesome that they are available, but for most people, I don’t see any of this stuff displacing cable TV and its counterparts.

Technical issues like drivers aside, there is a lot of maintenance and rigamarole involved in a slick homebrew media center. While these apps do a reasonable job of scanning your content and scraping metadata and artwork from the web, they’re far from perfect. I’m pretty meticulous with my filenames and directory structures, but I still ended up with a bunch of unidentified and completely misidentified TV shows and movies. That’s all fixed now, but it took a good number of hours, a lot of googling, and multiple helper apps to get it all straightened out.

I just don’t see that any of these media center/home theater PC solutions is even close to the “plug it in and turn it on” sort of functionality you get with a set-top box provided by your cable company (maybe AppleTV, which I’m guessing lets you get everything from the iTunes store). I like what I’ve got better, but I’m a tinkerer. It’s hard to see how any of this stuff replaces “real” TV for most consumers.