Category: htpc

The white font color used by XBMC’s Confluence theme was causing image retention on my plasma tv (even with a 1 minute black screen screensaver). To fight this I changed the color to a dark grey.

I’m using OpenELEC, adjust the paths as necessary.

1. Make a copy of the theme, so system updates don’t clobber the changes
   • cp -a /usr/share/xbmc/addons/skin.confluence addons/skin.confluence.gotham.edit/
2. Edit 720p/includes.xml, under <include name=”Clock”>, change <textcolor> from white to grey3
3. Change the skin name from Confluence to something else in addon.xml

Just replaced my heavily used Ubuntu HTPC with a 6 watt AppleTV 2. Both run XBMC.

Specs of the old, silent HTPC:

• Intel Core 2 Duo E4300 1.8GHz w/2MB Cache
• Intel DQ965GF motherboard with passive chipset heatsinks
• Scythe Ninja passive CPU heatsink
• 4GB (2x 2GB DIMMS) ADATA DDRII 800 MHz memory
• 512 MB MSI N210-MD512H GeForce 210 PCIe 2.0 passive video card
• 40 GB Kingston SSDNOW V-series (Intel rebranded) SATA SSD
• 18x DL DVD+-RW Optiarc Ad-7170S 2MB Cache SATA optical drive
• Antec Sonata case
• Dual 120mm Yate Loon case fans
• Seasonic 330W power supply
• Ubuntu 10.04 AMD64 with XBMC

Video is just as smooth on the AppleTV as on the HTPC.

For fun, I hooked up a Timex Sinclair 1000 to my TV and wrote a short program.

Here’s my whole setup. Three devices are running Linux, one OS X, and then whatever Cox puts on their POS DVR.

I reinstalled the OS on my “HTPC” once again, this time moving from Knoppmyth to Ubuntu Dapper. I was quite surprised to see the tv-out on my video card worked on boot, and even all the way through starting X. After setting a default user to login, and x11vnc for controlling the screen, I was surprised at how little time it took to finish the project.

Now I can control my HTPC using VNC Viewer on my Nokia 770, any other computer, or a mouse/keyboard i have hidden under the television stand.