For me the Revo is the perfect HTPC.  I evaluated several options for my HTPC before settling on the Revo.  Some of the contenders included the Seagate FreeAgent+ HD, the ASRock ION Mini PC, the Western Digital Media Player,  a Windows Home Server setup, and several others.  I actually purchased the FreeAgent+ HD device and gave it several days of trail in home.  Probably the only real problem with the FreeAgent was that I had already been using the XBMC software on my laptop and was spoiled by it’s ability to configure to my tastes.  The FreeAgent was very feature rich, and included the ability to stream media, do photo slideshows and play tracks from my audio collection, it just didn’t present everything as beautifully as the XBMC software.

My journey to the Revo began when I found this video review (click here to watch) of the product.  I did a lot of searching and reading and came to the conclusion that this device was the one I wanted to be the hart of my home theater.

I purchased my unit on eBay from a seller called 23port.  Visit their ebay store (here). It was a very positive transaction and I am very happy with the purchase.  I had an unused windows 7 license available from the purchase of another laptop that is not running Windows 7 and so I decided to get the less expensive Linux version and re OS the device myself.  I also chose this route for my purchase because the units sold by 23port included the TV Mounting adapter, the wireless keyboard and mouse and a larger HDD, at 320 GB.  Some of the units offered for sale in the US did not have all of these featured in the same package.

The Revo seems to have everything one would want for a HTPC. It has HDMI output, SPDIF digital audio out.  A ton of USB ports.  And since it has a dual core CPU, it has the processing power for playing 1080p HD content.  While I’m not really doing much with 1080p yet, since I am ripping my standard definition DVD collection, I know that I’ll want to include my BlueRay discs soon enough.

After setting up Windows 7 software, there are some things I did to make sure to get the best home theater experience from my Revo.  Most of what I’ve done to my system I did based in what I learned from the Paul J Roberts blog on the Revo.  So let me say thank you to Paul for blazing the trail on this and making my life easier

Paul J Roberts blog post about his Revo configuration basically provides the complete details of the steps needed to configure a Windows 7 system to work as your home theater PC.  So I’m not going to repeat much of that content here. Just visit his blog post (here) and follow his directions.

One thing to remember is that this unit does not have a built in CD/DVD player.  You will need to use an external device that is not included or use network attached devices.  For me this was no problem as I already have an external DVD  drive.