It turns out that it had to do with the brightness setting. I had turned down the brightness all the way because I was using the Kindle app to read. For some strange reason this affects the iPad’s ability to connect to wifi networks. Sounds insane, I know but it’s documented here: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3304
and setting the brightness back to the default did fix my issues.

I used Lifehacker’s handy guide for setting up an XBMC using an Acer Aspire Revo R1600 a while ago. The result was pretty good, but I noticed that 720p videos wouldn’t play smoothly. I figured I needed to upgrade to a more recent version, and this time around I looked a bit more into the installation process.

A few notes:

• Most guides mention using a large (2GB or greater) flash drive. This only applies if you need/want to run XBMC off of the actual flash drive. You actually don’t need this if you are just going to install onto the pc’s hard drive. It just needs to be large enough to hold the XBMC LIve image (~512MB). You can go even smaller if you want to run XBMC on Linux, which brings me to my next point.
• Install a minimal version of Ubuntu… In order to get smooth playback of 720p and 1080p videos, you’ve got to make sure VDPAU is set up properly. I wasn’t able to get this to happen with the XBMC Live 9.11 image even when I tried switching around drivers. Also if you just install Linux, you can use a tiny cheap USB flash drive instead. I think it needs <20MB. From there, you can use XCI script which really just does everything for you. And you can do so from your laptop SSH’d into the machine. It’s kinda annoying for me to sit in front of the TV using it as a display for installing and configuring things. A reasonable set of instructions is here in this post.
• Linux has the added advantage that it’s well setup for hooking up to SVN and GIT depots where you can get the latest versions of skins like Aeon (pictured above). XBMC Live images are also running Linux, but you’ll find yourself installing more packages if you plan on tinkering around yourself.
• Many guides also mention setting the iGPU setting in the Acer’s BIOS. On newer BIOS versions, it’s listed as a DMA option. It’s the same thing, bump it up to 256MB and you are good.
• I ordered my Acer R1600 from Amazon and with it, I also ordered this cheapo $8 remote . It works great except I couldn’t access 2 functions that I frequently need: The “Info” function and the “Context Menu” function. I also couldn’t figure out what kind of remote it was, whether it sent “real” commands or if it was just functioning as a keyboard over IR. Turns out it’s the latter and I just needed to modify the keyboard.xml file. I picked the “Desktop” and “MyPc” keys to remap. By flipping the HTPC into a console and pushing buttons on the remote, I found that MyPc maps to ‘e’ and Desktop maps to ‘d’. (I’m sure there’s probably a real way to output the mappings, but this was simple).  Both ‘e’ and ‘d’ aren’t used by XBMC by default so this worked just fine.
• To test if you have set up VDPAU correctly, press ‘o’ during playback of 720p or 1080p content. Look for the codec, it should have “vdpau” somewhere in there. If not, you don’t have it set up correctly. You should also see that you aren’t heavily using both cores of the CPU. If it’s setup wrong, the CPU will be doing a lot of work instead of offloading it to the GPU.

Now, I’m all setup and not only does 720p content play perfectly, but 1080p content plays perfectly as well. Good luck with your setup.

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Also, after nearly 5 years(!!!), maybe there will be something to play on the PSP. Gran Turismo comes out on Oct 1, and I can’t imagine it being a good driving sim with the PSP controls, but fingers crossed.