Media Player for Crouton

As an alternative to XBMC on Crouton, I am pleased to report that SMPlayer (a front-end for MPlayer) seems to work very well and that the visual quality of the video displayed is second to none.  My next candidate is VLC, primarily because I prefer multi-platform solutions.  That way, I have some reason to expect that a file I'm building or testing on Linux will play similarly on Windows (or vice-versa).

A Retraction

I sincerely regret that I must withdraw my enthusiastic endorsement of XBMC.  Although I remain very fond of the software, further use has revealed that the visual quality of the video it displays is noticably inferior to that of other media players.  I will admit that this difference may not be apparent to most people with most encoded video, but for me, it's a deal-breaker.  I have no idea why this is the case but hope it gets resolved.

CrOS Media Playback

I got the bright idea to exploit all that HDD real estate on the C7 by loading it up with media files. Unfortunately, Chrome OS's local video playback failed to impress me.  My testing was limited to the AVI & MP4 containers, standard definition video (DVD resolution) and mostly XviD & MP3, so other formats/codecs might fare differently.  In addition, I readily admit to being an obsessive videophile, so my expectations are very high.  In fairness to Google, I must also say that my opinion of Ubuntu's OOTB video playback is similar.

However, I can report that XBMC can be installed on Crouton and it works beautifully (at least for me)!  I would expect other media players to perform well too, but haven't yet confirmed this myself.

A Beginning

Prior to the introduction of the Pixel, running Linux on a Chromebook has required using the Chrome OS [CrOS] kernel with another distro's root file system.  As I understand it, Jay Lee, the developer of ChrUbuntu, recently switched from 32-bit (<=11.10) to 64-bit (>=12.04) Ubuntu which required him to substitute the Open Source Chromium OS kernel for the CrOS kernel distributed by Google.  Numerous issues with ChrUbuntu and a general lack of support led me to wish that I could switch back to Google's official (and constantly evolving) 32-bit kernel for CrOS.

Based primarily on the belief that Chromebook users would be better off sticking with Google's current CrOS kernel, I began testing 32-bit x86 Linux distros on my Acer C7. So far, the results of my experiments have been encouraging - not only does 32 bit Ubuntu 12.04.1 run without issues but it seems that most distros with Debian and/or Ubuntu lineage do as well.  Results with other distros have been mixed.  One key factor seems to be the use of initrd, which the CrOS kernel apparently does not support.  Keep in mind that I'm only reporting that these distros install and boot using my method because I did not test them extensively.



x86 Distros on the C7

Here, I'll attempt to document my method so that others can benefit.  IMHO, the distros I've highlighted represent the best match for the C7's hardware and resources.

In the meantime, I highly recommend checking out the Crouton script method developed by David Schneider.  It essentially enables you to run Ubuntu as an application on CrOS.  Credit for this find goes to Craig Errington.