What's a good device to run XBMC On at each TV?

Over the past 6 months I've upgraded all of the TV's in my house to flat screen Samsung. The 2 big TV's I got their media hub, for the smaller TV's I've gotten WDTV Live boxes. I've got a NAS that has a DLNA server. All in all, it sucks. The Samsung Media hub is hard to nagivate, no icons, no "watched" flags and is very unfriendly. The WDTV live is not a whole lot better. It's all like navigating a file structure with absolutly no features.

I used to run XBMC on the original XBox and recently took a look at it on a PC. Wow. Great features, great product.

My questions is this... What hardware could I run XBMC on at each TV location? I'm really not into building computers for each TV and I have to consider the fact that I will be scrapping the WDTV's and the Media HUB on the samsung TV's. Are there any hardware platforms worth considering at this time? I've got a growing collection of BD movies that I've ripped into my NAS as well as lots of XVID/Divx movies and TV series.

While all the 1st gen stuff I installed works, it's all so non user friendly, I'd like to consider something that has a rich feature set like XBMC.

Thanks,

Roveer

You can buy the AppleTV, however you can only do this currently on Apple TV 1 & 2 but not 3 (Just yet!)

You can then simply install XBMC and I believe you can install OpenELEC straight to the AppleTV but not looked into this just yet and off you go!

The AppleTV 2 without the addon of graphics chip only play 720p you can play a 1080p but will play as 720 I believe.

It's a few months to a year away from being stable, but XBMC for Android should bring a lot of sub $100-options. If you need something now, ATV1 + BCHD or ATV2 are probably the cheapest options. For sub $200 you can see some nice options in the hardware subforums.

ZBOX with openelec installed.

I have two Zboxes. They're good, but not cheap and the fan makes some noise. I have an ATV2 which isn't bad, but requires a software hack and the menus are a bit chuggy. I also have a Raspberry Pi, which is cheap but not really powerful enough, IMO.

I think I'd recommend an Android box. The XIOS DS is a cheap, silent box that the XBMC developers have created a native version. A final version hasn't been released yet, but you might want to check that out before going for another option. I expect the Android build will work on cheap tablets soon too.

+1 atv2

(2012-07-21 01:52)Ned Scott Wrote:  It's a few moCnths to a year away from being stable, but XBMC for Android should bring a lot of sub $100-options. If you need something now, ATV1 + BCHD or ATV2 are probably the cheapest options. For sub $200 you can see some nice options in the hardware subforums.

When these android boxes are used with the xbmc app does it matter what brand they are or can you use any of the android tv boxes the reason I ask is I was thinking of getting one and found one that seems pretty good specs

Here is just one example

http://www.dealsdirect.com.au/p/android-...tv-gtv220/

There is others with different specs but this does say it is 1080p playable on it and it has what looks like a Ethernet plug on the back

I have found others on eBay with up to date versions of android not sure what the minimum for it is though

You'll need to be careful which machine you buy. Some are better spec than others, plus most are not currently natively supported by the XBMC team.

The only hardware we know that will work for sure is the Pivos XIOS DS. Everything else is "maybe" at this stage until XBMC for Android is more developed.

Personally I would say a basic Mac mini. Fairly affordable at $600 I know an appletv2 is about $120 but I have one as well I found it slow and sluggish and the lack of USB for external storage frustrating since I couldn't seem to figure out how to treat my media library to the apple tv2. I'm currently using a Mac mini with a drobo 4 bay unit attached with FireWire with 4 3 terabyte drives installed and couldn't be happier.