Anyone ever 'finished' an xbmc box?

The fear of a angry girlfriend prevents me from messing around with my htpc.. plus it really sucks when you get home from work wanting to watch something and when you turn on the htpc you remember that upgrading Ubuntu has broken something and the htpc isn't going to play anything until you spend some time fixing it... That's usually when the missus chimes in with 'An upgrade is meant to make things better not break them!!!'

One thing I have learnt from mucking about with xbmc is ALWAYS MAKE A BACKUP! Being able to restore a broken system in under an hour I priceless! I have automated backups of my database, xbmc settings folder and my Linux system settings and I will clone the whole hdd before I do any major screwing around...

Anyways my htpc is near perfect now, I just have a few functions I need to map to my harmony remote and some confluence skin tweaks to do, but these things aren't really essential, just a matter of convenience...

This thread is great - we're all hackers, tinkerers, geeks, those who have to open the damn thing, and eggheads.

But we also make the world go 'round

Happy builds lads.

(2012-04-24 03:11)CutSickAss Wrote:  

m7cky Wrote:Can we attach a medical-esque name to it that I can quote to the Mrs when she asks we why I 'keep f***ing about with it when it's not broken!'?

I don't know any medical/psychological term for it, but here's something better you can quote to the Mrs... poetry:

Constantine P. Cavafy Wrote:When you set out on your journey to Ithaca,
pray that the road is long,
full of adventure, full of knowledge...

That basically sums up my feelings on XBMC and HTPCs in general. Even though I'm relatively new at this, building the perfect 'box' for me has been more about the process itself, rather than the end result. Come to think of it, maybe it is time I watched a movie on XBMC from beginning to end!

Love this quote!
Tried it on the Mrs after yet more tinkering, response went something like this;

'very clever, now if Breaking Bad is not on my TV in the next 2 minutes, I'm going to throw the damn thing out the window & dig the DVD player out'

Women!!


Not my fault if the extrafanart wasn't working on that particular series, was I just supposed to leave it & watch the show?
As if!

I have recently upgraded, with a second hand cpu, gpu and motherboard, my HTPC. I did that so that the parts from in went to build one for my son so that he could enjoy XBMC.

Now that it is configured and running I just use it and rarely bother to do anything but enjoy the TV shows or films I have in my media library. I have only just figured out how to advance / delay subs, due to them being needed for one film. Then I noticed certain films were wrongly identified by the scraper being used. So manually I have refreshed those. I have most of the functionality with my MCE remote and what is lacking I have a wireless keyboard.

I am not really a "tinkerer" as I tend to use the XBMC (as I did when I used Media Portal) as a conduit for my entertainment and not entertainment in itself.! This, for me, is quite refreshing as I was always having to mess with Media Portal to get it to work consistently. XBMC tends to be more robust and require less tinkering to keep it working, in my experience.

I find it strangely addictive, i went from using old parts to replace a shit wdtv i bought to having 3 xbmc systems around the house all with new hardware + a new server up in the loft. Also had to buy a new Panasonic 50' plasma and a pioneer 5.1 system. ( i say 'had' to buy, thats what i told the boss, ( wife))


Xbmc owes me a fortune :-)

Matt