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+---- Thread: XBMC on Raspberry Pi - Wonder if this will work out? (Historical Discussion Thread) (/showthread.php?tid=113824)
- PaulC2K - 2012-03-01
welshblob Wrote:Interesting that people got it for £29.46 from Farnell. My pre-order is £26.55 + VAT (£31.86) and the base price seems to include postage. I have also registered my interest at just after 6 with RS.Not that im suggesting theres doubt in the pricing...
As for the load on the servers neither distributor is really geared up for the high street consumer website load at sale time and my guess the only sites that may have coped would have been amazon and ebay. Of course this is easy to say in hindsight.
It was disappointing however esp as RS didn't seem to have a clue what was going on and the foundation thought they were supposed to be selling rather than building mailing list! I expect there will be another ddos on their site when they do get stock and start selling them ... joy joy.
Rob
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/20670693/xbmc/pi_invoice.jpg
I do wonder though, perhaps the marginally cheaper price is the Pi-China produced price, and your slightly inflated cost is the Farrell-somewhere produced price? If its costing them an extra £1 to do it their way instead, they're having to pass on the price, but not profitting from the original batch?
Complete guess, but it could explain things. I havent figured out if this now means they'll be UK produced or if they'll still be done overseas? Hopefully Farrell & RS have their suppliers and can get a slightly better deal done within the UK which means faster turn-around for a marginally increased price.
castalla Wrote:It was a shambles - Farrell in Spain seemed to have no idea what was going on, and I never got anywhere near any sort of order form - just an expression of interest form, after hours of 'internal server errors'.
Less time spent blogging to fanboys and more on organising the release sales might have been more productive.
They could have done things far better, although it wasnt quite last minute or unannounced, it leaves a lot to be desired. I signed up for their newsletter for exactly the purpose they said it'd have... thats nowhere to be seen, i only found out because a friend pointed it out on Monday night, though i prolly would have checked every other day for news anyway, and i stay well clear of twitter & facebook, and you'd expect the newsletter to be 1 of their means of communication (should you really need 2-3 just incase?) and that probably let a few people down who werent keeping a close eye on movement.
- Milhouse - 2012-03-01
PaulC2K Wrote:Not that im suggesting theres doubt in the pricing...
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/20670693/xbmc/pi_invoice.jpg
Wow, looks like I've been overcharged at £26.55, and mine is on back-order - the current price if you were to buy it now is exactly as you paid, £24.55 (before VAT). I'll try and find the time to contact Farnell in the morning and ask for the reduction/correction. Have also tweeted the Foundation to let them know about the price correction/overcharge.
Thanks for the heads up!
PaulC2K Wrote:I do wonder though, perhaps the marginally cheaper price is the Pi-China produced price, and your slightly inflated cost is the Farrell-somewhere produced price? If its costing them an extra £1 to do it their way instead, they're having to pass on the price, but not profitting from the original batch?
If there are price differences depending on where the Pi is sourced, Farnell should eat it and average out the cost so that all their customers pay a single price.
My £26.55 order is on back-order, so I figure the new price (assuming the £26.55 was an early listing error - God knows it must have been chaos) should apply as I haven't actually bought and paid for it yet - I don't have an invoice, don't have a contract etc. Will update the thread with what they say.
PaulC2K Wrote:I havent figured out if this now means they'll be UK produced or if they'll still be done overseas? Hopefully Farrell & RS have their suppliers and can get a slightly better deal done within the UK which means faster turn-around for a marginally increased price.
I thought the Pi's were all being produced in China, presumably a single factory and Farnell/RS are just handling sales and global distribution? Taking a small cut, obviously, but eliminating a huge administrative burden from the Foundation. I could be wrong, but I don't think the any R-Pis are being manufactured in the UK as it's too expensive - maddeningly UK companies have to pay import duty (or some tax) on components used in manufacture, but they don't have to pay the same import duty/tax on completed products which makes manufacture in the UK prohibitively expensive compared with manufacturing the same product in China then importing into the UK. Apparently the duty/tax issue is being looked into (should be scrapped entirely on components, or reversed so tax is paid on import of finished products not components) as it's clearly bonkers and puts UK manufacturers at a massive disadvantage.
PaulC2K Wrote:They could have done things far better, although it wasnt quite last minute or unannounced, it leaves a lot to be desired. I signed up for their newsletter for exactly the purpose they said it'd have... thats nowhere to be seen, i only found out because a friend pointed it out on Monday night, though i prolly would have checked every other day for news anyway, and i stay well clear of twitter & facebook, and you'd expect the newsletter to be 1 of their means of communication (should you really need 2-3 just incase?) and that probably let a few people down who werent keeping a close eye on movement.
I was on the mailing list be never received any notification, I don't think anyone did - probably one of those things to got overlooked in the rush to launch. I suspect it has all been very last minute, and there's probably a huge learning curve for everyone involved. The biggest culprits in terms of the launch were definitely Farnell and RS, businesses that live and die on the web yet failed spectacularly. The Foundation were left to carry the can and couldn't do anything but take a boat load of abuse from random cowards wanting their Pis and having hissy fits, quite incredible really!
Yes it was all very disappointing, frustrating and I wasted an entire morning and have had very little sleep, but there really was no need for some of what poor Liz went through.
- PaulC2K - 2012-03-01
Yeah, i understand the stupid issue with UK tax on components, its crazy how we'll shoot ourselves in the foot with some things isnt it.
I guess doubling up on tax, combined with cheaper labour its too much to overcome until they fix that.
Have to admit there was a fair bit of colourful language floating around my head yesterday morning
Im usually up till pretty late as this post proves, but i'd planned on going to sleep a little earlier each day of the week and 6am was pushing it a little, so to be sat there at 6:30am having seen a total of maybe 5 pages load and Liz saying Farnell have sold out :confused2: didnt fill me with confidence, RS still only showing 'register interest' and of the 2 suggestions from Farnell's search (which only listed the category iirc) made little sense to me but neither of them loading so i had no idea if it was even the right page to be trying to load, and then somehow one of the multitude of tabs open for various pages one loaded with the item and i just F5'd my way through the cart process till near enough 8am.Around 6:15, Liz posted on twitter something along the lines of "if your being asked to register your interest on the RS site, you've got the wrong page", i was very tempted to sign up to twitter, ask what the damn right page was then, followed by some choice words/terms
:oI did have a look at the general comments popping up around 6:30am, and some were completely uncalled for, plenty i happened to agree with but to bash someone about it publicly just to vent is fairly uncalled for IMO, especially as this isnt an Apple or Microsoft launch. Is pretty much why i stay away from places like Twitter & Facebook.
- darkscout - 2012-03-01
Good news. The "Scene" has moved from XVID/AVI files to x264/MP4 for all future TV shows.
- Jimmer - 2012-03-01
MilhouseVH Wrote:Yes it was all very disappointing, frustrating and I wasted an entire morning and have had very little sleep, but there really was no need for some of what poor Liz went through.
I feel the same way. Although, in total the whole thing was an 'experience'.... and nobody really had a god-given right to one of the first batch (although to look at some of the things said on twitter....)
I could have cheerfully given some of those twitter hero toe-rags a right smacking for the way they gave out to Liz......
- daniloz - 2012-03-01
Any one knows if it's possible to access contents over the network with this?
- Jimmer - 2012-03-01
daniloz Wrote:Any one knows if it's possible to access contents over the network with this?
Sure, as long as you run an ethernet cable to it or plug in a usb wi-fi stick that has open source drivers.
It'll just run linux for arm. Anything that can be compiled to run on arm linux will most likely work. The trick will be compiling things to be optimised for this particular arm varient. If you look at the r-pi forum, there's a massive amount of people wanting to do a massive variety of work on the r-pi. XBMC is just a tiny subset of what will be compiled and optimised for the platform in the coming months.....
- pike - 2012-03-01
@PaulC2K I was also part of this 'experience' and at the end it felt like 2hrs of wasted time, plain and simple + some disinformation and let's not forget that neither of the shops did a good job handling this.
With that said, sooner or later, there will be a rpi for everyone
- Milhouse - 2012-03-01
MilhouseVH Wrote:Wow, looks like I've been overcharged at £26.55, and mine is on back-order - the current price if you were to buy it now is exactly as you paid, £24.55 (before VAT). I'll try and find the time to contact Farnell in the morning and ask for the reduction/correction. Have also tweeted the Foundation to let them know about the price correction/overcharge.
Thanks for the heads up!
Just off the phone to Farnell and apparently £26.55 was indeed an error, and everyone should be charged £24.55 (including me with my back-order, even though my order history still shows a price of £26.55 - fingers crossed they remember to charge the right price come delivery time!)
Speaking of which, Farnell originally estimated 26 March for delivery of my order but last night I received an email update indicating this date had now slipped to 23 April!
- sraue - 2012-03-01
Jimmer Wrote:XBMC is just a tiny subset of what will be compiled and optimised for the platform in the coming months.....
sure it must be a bit optimized, but all in all it runs already:
http://openelec.tv/news/item/235-openelec-on-raspberry-pi-our-first-arm-device-supported
- zackpliskin - 2012-03-01
voochi Wrote:To call an $8000 sound system 'medium-end' is pretentious in the extreme.
However I have come to expect such pretention from hi-fi nuts and 'audiophiles'.
I'm a musician, and I've never understood that obsession, right down to the mostly meaningless minutiae. The thing is, some of the records they're striving so hard to recreate with "perfect fidelity" were probably recorded with cheap instruments on whatever old tape was lying around the studio that day. Seems senseless to spend more on reproduction equipment than was probably spent on the entire record.
Anyway, back on topic. Raspbmc is obviously very early days as a releasable XBMC distro, the brand new WP site with skeletal structure in place, but I'm looking forward to seeing it available to download. When it is, will be well worth even casual XBMC fans picking up the Raspberry Pi. My own intended use is as a portable platform to turn any HDMI bearing TV into a media centre, instantly. So many people I know have the TV, but don't want the time/money/hassle of a HTPC rig, so with the Rpi, a powered USB hub, a 2.5" USB2 SATA HDD and cheap IR remote with dongle (if this is possible; I guess drivers would be needed) I can show them what they are missing.
- Jaken - 2012-03-01
@sraue
Why only model B? With a usb ethernet adapter the model A should be equally useful for XBMC.
- bboo - 2012-03-01
The ideal use for me would be the ability to have a torrent client and xbmc on this device. Can this be possible?
- Jaken - 2012-03-01
bboo Wrote:The ideal use for me would be the ability to have a torrent client and xbmc on this device. Can this be possible?
Sure it could. I'm not just sure about the performance using both xbmc and a torrent client at the same time.
- krampf - 2012-03-01
bboo Wrote:The ideal use for me would be the ability to have a torrent client and xbmc on this device. Can this be possible?
that is exactly what i wanna do, and a torrent client like transmission for example needs nearly zero performance, maybe at start when ist hashs the torrents.