[snowjim]

There's the fundamental flaw in your argument... You always need to take into account the software you plan to run on your hardware... This is a fundamental design philosophy of software architecture... Ask Microsoft, Oracle or any major software vendor for that matter.

Yes I agree that hardware do play a part and you do adjust the hardware to what you needs. But that do not mean that I inspect that every software that I will run is working perfect on this specific hardware, there is simple not enough time to investigate all this and you don't have to be cause it will work in 99% of the cases. If there is a new game on the market there might be problems on some hardware yes but it will almost always be fixed.

I know that Im dragging games in to this and I know that that business is a lot bigger with bigger financials(I suspect). But it sets often high requirements(Audio/Video) on the setup it runs on just as XBMC seems to do.

---

Like I said my setup in post #9 performs flawlessly (including Bluray content) without any lag or audio sync issues...

Thats great, but its not that great that I need to nestle my way in to individual threads in the forum to find a recommendation. Is it correct that there is about 1 new major version of XBMC every year? That would mean that one hade to do only one recommendation on hardware per year. And if not even the developers can say what hardware it works perfect on, then maybe some kind of voting system where setups with most votes also is the most recommended once. I know, a lot of work but it would speek to more users.

No problem. I completely understand both sides of the issue. Whenever somebody recommends hardware (esp a team member) they are really putting their neck out and really open themselves up for criticism if it doesn't work out.

I'm being completely honest and telling you that these rigs are incredibly stable and give me great pleasure - however, unknowns could still ruin it for your setup.

For example:
Tweaks (like XVBA) can make a huge difference.
I run a HUP script upon sleep resume - this helped with various issues prior to 2.99.1 of OE
Some receivers have a mysterious lipsync issue when audio is sync'd to display running at 23.976
VC-1 interlaced and TrueHD on MKV (exactly two titles) had to be muxed to FLAC
I have no idea if the optical outs work well - I'm purely HDMI

Do these issues and tweaks mean that XBMC should still be considered beta for my hardware? Hell no!

I would go for it even if it was on a Apple product.

I would instantly leave XBMC if it was only to run on Apple

Ditto.

Thanks, I get that, but even when the setup is so sensitive you think that its a good idé to mix in multiplatform to make it even harder to match? Would not more closed environment recommendation be a solution, for example openElec where the developer have full control over the environments and drivers? How do game developers handles this? Games do demand a lot of both Video and Audio for the most part?

It's hard to make any hardware/platform recommendations for flawless core functionality for a couple reasons. Core functionality changes for different people. For me and I'd assume most users, the library functions are a core function yet I routinely see people post in the forums who don't use the library. Secondly, any single platform can have differences that affect how XBMC or any software functions. A difference in a bios revision can make a difference. Even within the same line of hardware there can be different chip sets or the machine assembled at a different factory. All these can introduce minor differences that can have an impact on the software installed.

Yes I get that, but XBMC team could decide what core functions is (probably Video/Music/Library), make it rock solid and then let the user decide what parts to use.

Could the multiplatform be a part of why XBMC is so sensitive about the environment it is running in? How do Game developers handles problems like this? Could a recommendation of a more closed environment like openelec where the developer have total control over system and drivers be a solution?

Not only that, but given that XBMC is entirely built around audio/video, the other equipment used along with it is just as important. One person may find that their hardware works fantastically with their specific TV/AVR combination but another person with the exact same box will end up frustrated when the TV fails to correctly fit XBMC to its screen, or their receiver is picky about the audio.

If anyone wants to pick the right hardware for their use case, then they need to do research, not blindly try random combinations hoping for the best.

But how do you research a fully working setup when not even developers of XBMC dear to give recommendations(in most cases)? And If I can´t look at what other users have because of other connected hardware? And add to this that you can choose from 7-8 diffrent environments to run it on, how easy will it be to find the solution that will be giving me the best experience?

I am apparently having a hard time to get this perfect even when I do research on all hardware I buy for PC builds so how would a casual user do this?

I agree that a closed hw platform might result in a more general flawless experience. But we would loose all users who use xbmc outside of their living room or who use xbmc just because it is available for some hardware they have lying around. If we wouldmake such an annoncement in our blog (maybe we could test on april 1st) - this would be the blog post with the most negative comments ever.

Haha yes that would be fun to see. I think that the problem here is that users goes from WDTV and BOXEE and when doing this they go from ALOT of problems to miner once and thats probably why they don´t care about the details. Its possible that I´m simple to picky

Its however up to the XBMC team to decide how to develop the product, I suspect that there is a lot of "users" that wanted XBMC for XBOX360 but this was a no go early on. And of course, If you once opend up for multiplatform it will be more or less impossible to switch back, but its still possible to favor a specific setup to make this working perfect while others will work all from okay to almost perfect.

I can tell you - macmini (basically core i5 with intel hd4000 used with hdmi - yamaha avr - lgtv) running ubuntu 12.10 with bumped kernel 3.7.7 with latest master runs flawless (nom ag, no audio sync error, no stutter, no whatever). Now you go buy the same setup and it doesn't fit your experience. What will you do? You will blame me for lying (in your eyes). That's why we don't recommend things. Because we can't.

How do game developers do? Yes they often got problems in the beginning but they usually get it working great for most users elser thay would be out of job I think. Yes of course its a big difference between game developers and XBMC development specially financial.

So coming back to the topic. I do this boring stuff at work. But there they tell me what bugs they find. Beeing as unspecific as "stabelize the core" from a developer? Do you code javascript or what?

Are you suggesting that I'm a bad developer because I ask these questions? Really? Have we reach that low lever of this discussion? I do code JavaScript but I prefer .NET, not sure what this have to do with the thread doe?

I did not see any point to go in to detail about the problems I got, It was more a general discussion where you could jump in or not. Dont think that I haven't asks/searched for solutions on that problems that I runned in to and some have been solved while some not. A lot of hours have been invested in just that(thought that was clear based on the thread).

Next thing is we'll have 4K TVs and 4K material and people will complain that XBMC doesn't work again...

Okay, so the problem here is my LG 60PK550 TV, my Yamaha RX-V1500 receiver, my Logitect K400 keyboard, my H.264 1080p files, my Netgear router, my Logitech Harmony One remote? And yet you think its a great thing to ad multiplatform as a extra layer of complexity?

[snowjim]

I think that we will simple agree to disagree, most of you sees what I´m fishing for and I see your thought about XBMC. I never thought that anything would change with this thread, I just wanted to hear others view of it.

I'm vary grateful to the developers that invest there own time in to this project and I will continue looking for that perfect setup (next time I do a upgrade).

I do only hope that it will be more clear what setup to use in the futures or even better, a solution that works perfect on all setups(in the best of worlds )

[vicbitter]

Like I said my setup in post #9 performs flawlessly (including Bluray content) without any lag or audio sync issues...

Thats great, but its not that great that I need to nestle my way in to individual threads in the forum to find a recommendation. Is it correct that there is about 1 new major version of XBMC every year? That would mean that one hade to do only one recommendation on hardware per year. And if not even the developers can say what hardware it works perfect on, then maybe some kind of voting system where setups with most votes also is the most recommended once. I know, a lot of work but it would speek to more users.

Ummm.... You were the one asking about my setup... Can't be bothered reading replies in your own thread What more do you want!

How do game developers do? Yes they often got problems in the beginning but they usually get it working great for most users elser thay would be out of job I think. Yes of course its a big difference between game developers and XBMC development specially financial.

Wow! Comparing Game Development to XBMC Development is a big call... Have you seen the amount of investment made by Game Console manufacturers to bring their platforms to market? Not to mention the amount of investment that traditional Operating System vendors have had to make to support Game developers. Take a read on the history of DirectX (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectX) to give you a flavour of the effort involved.

Then there is the investment by the hardware vendors (such as, nVidia)... Again, take a look at the release notes for nVidia's video drivers to see the amount of "enhancements" they make as new Games are released.

So all in all... The Game Developers (as part of a multi-billion dollar industry) have the full support of the Console manufacturers, Operating System vendors and hardware vendors to have the BEST possible gaming platforms available to sell their games.

XBMC on the other hand is, a fantastic free media player platform that puts most (if not all) commerical offerings to shame, made possible by a dedicated community of developers & users who just want to bring their collective ideas together to continue to take XBMC to the next level...

[nickr]

seems to me you made a really bad choice somewhere.

Pretty well guaranteed to work well with a recent nvidia graphics card and linux, eg xbmcbuntu or openelec.

Why you would want to run a media PC on windows is beyond me, unless you want something that runs silverlight or some other proprietary crap. Even than I would prefer to avoid proprietary crap.

[Martijn]

seems to me you made a really bad choice somewhere.

Pretty well guaranteed to work well with a recent nvidia graphics card and linux, eg xbmcbuntu or openelec.

Why you would want to run a media PC on windows is beyond me, unless you want something that runs silverlight or some other proprietary crap. Even than I would prefer to avoid proprietary crap.

The majority of xbmc users are in fact windows users.

[youngman]

The majority of xbmc users are in fact windows users.

...Doesn't mean they're right though, does it?!

[Memphiz]

@snowjim you clearly missed my smiley. I just wanted you to elicit and make you standup from your chair. What i wanted to say is that "Stabilize core in regard to audio/video/library" is just a nice marketing generic statement which doesn't result in any clue on my side on what to do.Get specific. (and i don't mean "GUI is slow" - i mean reproduction description - basically a bug report as you might know and demand it from your work). Bugreports don't garanty that they get worked on (trac is overloaded as you know) but thats the only thing that i can suggest if you don't want to dip your hands into code yourself.

Well best thing of course would be if you just would dig into XBMC and start improving what you think needs improvement. Of course i get that you are not interested in this cause its a major effort which needs a lot of time. But so are we. The problem with my hardware recommendation is that i just stated "yamah avr" and "lgtv" ... as it seems you have the same manufacturers. But i'm 100% sure that yamaha is not good/compatible enough in general - like lgtv too.

Beside the fact that the forum hides important information. We have a wiki which is writable by anyone who wants to contribute (get people to write up their setups somewhere or just start a template site and get them to fill it out).

XBMC is a huge project (and we decided it to be one sort of, by doing the multiplatform stuff) with a low number of constantly working developers. But we don't start to burn out ourselfs because of those facts. XBMC is there for 10 years and it will be another 10 years. Development is as slow as it needs to be and if your requirements are not met with current state of XBMC then you can of course tell us (like you did) and hope that someone takes someone usefull out of it (i havn't yet tbh) or (thats what i would do) you could just skip trying to use it.

I use alot of open source software. And there is a lot of software which doesn't fit my needs. But i'm just to lazy to even try to make it better just by talking to their devs (as i know how pointless it is). If i really need it - i code it up until it fits (that's what i have done on openwrt for example) - and contribute it back to the upstream team - or if i can't i'm just out of luck - thats life.

About all your questions regarding to "how do game developers do it". I tend to answer "They are much more sorted and more professional then we are". But not sure if this is even the case or if its just man power.

While i really enjoy this discussion it doesn't seem to end up in any improvements in our code yet.

PS: new OSX 10.8.3 will stabilize XBMC without code changes in XBMC.
PSS: For getting ethernet to work on ubuntu with the macmini i really had to get my hands dirty in the broadcom ethernet driver. So no - there is no out of the box solution for stuff like this per se and some people bear with this stuff better then others.

[Ned Scott]

I think there's this assumption that because one XBMC dev is working on one thing, then that must mean it's taking away from someone working on a core issue. This is simply not the case. More often than not, we have developers working on improving the boring core features, and making them work better than ever. They choose to do this, but only some of them. Not only can we not force all developers to work on core features, we wouldn't want to. Various developers for XBMC have various specialties, and sometimes that means they're not suited to work on database this, or audio that. It's far more complex than just assuming that every dev can work on every feature.

Also:

XBMC is becoming more modular, and that makes the core of XBMC a lot more stable.

Never assume someone is not working on something simply because it isn't fixed right now.

We have a hardware requirements (wiki) page on the wiki. Feel free to make a hardware recommendations (wiki) page as well.

[snowjim]

Ummm.... You were the one asking about my setup... Can't be bothered reading replies in your own thread What more do you want!

I have read your recommendation, thanks for that but my post that you quote clearly states "Thats great, but its not that great that I need to nestle my way in to individual threads in the forum to find a recommendation"

See

Thats great, but its not that great that I need to nestle my way in to individual threads in the forum to find a recommendation. ..

I can nestel my way down in the forum to find recommendations that users says working perfect, what I would like (and what I have said multiple times in this thread) is a more public recommendation of setup. A more easy to find recommendation.

If you feel that you need to make fun of it then, have fun. I don't mind.

Wow! Comparing Game Development to XBMC Development is a big call... Have you seen the amount of investment made by Game Console manufacturers to bring their platforms to market? Not to mention the amount of investment that traditional Operating System vendors have had to make to support Game developers. Take a read on the history of DirectX (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectX) to give you a flavour of the effort involved...

And again I wrote in earlier post :

I know that Im dragging games in to this and I know that that business is a lot bigger with bigger financials(I suspect). But it sets often high requirements(Audio/Video) on the setup it runs on just as XBMC seems to do.

I am no game developer (if that was not clear) and I don't know first thing about game development, but I know that there is a lot of indie games that works good but its possible that the Video/Audio programming is nothing compare to XBMC development. Yes I do know that Nividia and ATI makes tweak in there drivers all the time for games, but this is often for extreme games that really pushes the technology right? As I'm stated A LOT of times in this thread, I don't think you are doing a bad job I just asks if you have considered another way and its clear that you have but thought that this one was the best for XBMC.

seems to me you made a really bad choice somewhere.

Pretty well guaranteed to work well with a recent nvidia graphics card and linux, eg xbmcbuntu or openelec.

Why you would want to run a media PC on windows is beyond me, unless you want something that runs silverlight or some other proprietary crap. Even than I would prefer to avoid proprietary crap.

Yes but 3 times? I choose Windows becouse I like the flexibility to get out in windows, handling files(if needed), use spotify, browse internet and so on. I'm not any good as Linux so if there would be problems with setup files and so on It would take hours for me to fix it.

I also suspect that Windows is the platform that is most used for XBMC but probably also one of the environments that could change the condition for XBMC.

The majority of xbmc users are in fact windows users.

...Doesn't mean they're right though, does it?!

If this really is a serious comment, then you suggest that XBMC is working with out a doubt better on other platforms? Is that true? There is no way for me as user to know information like this beside test it my self or read A LOT of threads.

Well best thing of course would be if you just would dig into XBMC and start improving what you think needs improvement. Of course i get that you are not interested in this cause its a major effort which needs a lot of time. But so are we. The problem with my hardware recommendation is that i just stated "yamah avr" and "lgtv" ... as it seems you have the same manufacturers. But i'm 100% sure that yamaha is not good/compatible enough in general - like lgtv too.

Im not sure what you means by this? How could TV and Receiver have anything to do on how XBMC runns? I have never had problems like that, mabe there is users that have but I never heard of it. My problems is strictly softaware,

I will do a fresh installation with XBMC 12 and see if that works better for me, if not I will try to report bugs but as you say, there is alot of other bugs/tasks that is probably more fun to do.

Beside the fact that the forum hides important information. We have a wiki which is writable by anyone who wants to contribute (get people to write up their setups somewhere or just start a template site and get them to fill it out).

Might be a good idé but its possible that I will to be taken seriously because im just a user.

...While i really enjoy this discussion it doesn't seem to end up in any improvements in our code yet.

Agreed, lets end the discussion. As I said, Agree to disagree.

I think there's this assumption that because one XBMC dev is working on one thing, then that must mean it's taking away from someone working on a core issue. This is simply not the case. More often than not, we have developers working on improving the boring core features, and making them work better than ever. They choose to do this, but only some of them. Not only can we not force all developers to work on core features, we wouldn't want to. Various developers for XBMC have various specialties, and sometimes that means they're not suited to work on database this, or audio that. It's far more complex than just assuming that every dev can work on every feature.

Also:

XBMC is becoming more modular, and that makes the core of XBMC a lot more stable.

Never assume someone is not working on something simply because it isn't fixed right now.

We have a hardware requirements (wiki) page on the wiki. Feel free to make a hardware recommendations (wiki) page as well.

Im not sure why we still talk about work? I am not trying to make you feel bad about your jobb, its a great jobb and I have said it alot of times already. All I say is that if XBMC stability vary widely on different setups it would be great to get a solid recommendation from the team that works on it (or maybe even from the users). The hardware requirements to usually only tells what you need to run something not the best setup to get it working.

[Memphiz]

Just for completness - avr + tv matters alot.

For example - a friend of mine bought a sony tv and plugged his atv2 running xbmc on it and told me that his h.264 movies stuttered like shit and what i am getting paid for in this stupid project. I just told him to turn off all the fancy image enhancement features and 2000 Hz technology stuff of his tv and he came back with smooth as butter playback.

Second thing - when it comes to HDMI and Audio HDMI the AVR plays a big role. It can even lead to async audio/video experience. That's stuff we can hardly get a hold off with just software since HDMI is abstracted a lot on all platforms/operating systems and we don't have that much control of it. That said - a complete reproducable (!!!) working hardware configuration would need to be as complete as possible.

Example:

OS: Ubuntu 12.10 with kernel 3.7.7 from ppa + self patched brcm tg3 eth driver -> install instructions
XBMC: 12.0 Frodo (or nightly build with revision adjasdjiu23942) - installed from TeamXBMC nightly ppa
HW: MacMini late 2012 - 8GB DDR3 RAM (Samsung), Intel Corei5 2.5 GHz, 500 GB 2.5" HDD (manufacturer?), Intel HD4000 (mainboard, dvd drive type and so on, ethernet card)
Network: 1GBit/s Ethernet cable
AUDIO/VIDEO Connection: direct HDMI to AVR (not displayport!)
AVR: YAMAHA RX V367 (AVR settings - audio from HDMI - no passthrough to TV - lipsync on)
TV: LG 37 LH 7020 - kino mode on, true motion off, all enhancements turned off (dyn contrast, whatever i don't remember out of my mind now) - connected to AVR via direct HDMI
NAS: seagate dockstar - hacked with debian wheezy, connected via gbit ethernet to router, 1000GB Seagate 2.5" FreeAgent HDD, Sundtek DVB-C Stick, Smargo SmartCard Reader/USB
- runnig kernel 2.6.34
- running mysql version blah
- running nfs server
- running samba version blah
- running tvheadend version blah
- running ushare version blah
- running blah
Router: TP-Link WR1043ND running OpenWrt kamikaze, 8GB USB-Stick (manufacturer), Boblight via USB (schematics).
Remote: Motorola Nyxboard, Apple iDevice running Official XBMC Remote 1.1

Not sure if i got every piece of hardware that is involved. But setup recommendations should be that detailed (even more when it comes to my nas) for preventing more support hazzle.

But maybe thats the difference with games? XBMC needs alot of more toys around connected and playing together for beeing flawless. If the NAS sucks - what can XBMC does against that without stuttering?

Agree on disagree <- i like that and +1 that.

[snowjim]

Just for completness - avr + tv matters alot.

For example - a friend of mine bought a sony tv and plugged his atv2 running xbmc on it and told me that his h.264 movies stuttered like shit and what i am getting paid for in this stupid project. I just told him to turn off all the fancy image enhancement features and 2000 Hz technology stuff of his tv and he came back with smooth as butter playback.

Second thing - when it comes to HDMI and Audio HDMI the AVR plays a big role. It can even lead to async audio/video experience. That's stuff we can hardly get a hold off with just software since HDMI is abstracted a lot on all platforms/operating systems and we don't have that much control of it. That said - a complete reproducable (!!!) working hardware configuration would need to be as complete as possible.

Example:

OS: Ubuntu 12.10 with kernel 3.7.7 from ppa + self patched brcm tg3 eth driver -> install instructions
XBMC: 12.0 Frodo (or nightly build with revision adjasdjiu23942) - installed from TeamXBMC nightly ppa
HW: MacMini late 2012 - 8GB DDR3 RAM (Samsung), Intel Corei5 2.5 GHz, 500 GB 2.5" HDD (manufacturer?), Intel HD4000 (mainboard, dvd drive type and so on, ethernet card)
Network: 1GBit/s Ethernet cable
AUDIO/VIDEO Connection: direct HDMI to AVR (not displayport!)
AVR: YAMAHA RX V367 (AVR settings - audio from HDMI - no passthrough to TV - lipsync on)
TV: LG 37 LH 7020 - kino mode on, true motion off, all enhancements turned off (dyn contrast, whatever i don't remember out of my mind now) - connected to AVR via direct HDMI
NAS: seagate dockstar - hacked with debian wheezy, connected via gbit ethernet to router, 1000GB Seagate 2.5" FreeAgent HDD, Sundtek DVB-C Stick, Smargo SmartCard Reader/USB
- runnig kernel 2.6.34
- running mysql version blah
- running nfs server
- running samba version blah
- running tvheadend version blah
- running ushare version blah
- running blah
Router: TP-Link WR1043ND running OpenWrt kamikaze, 8GB USB-Stick (manufacturer), Boblight via USB (schematics).
Remote: Motorola Nyxboard, Apple iDevice running Official XBMC Remote 1.1

Not sure if i got every piece of hardware that is involved. But setup recommendations should be that detailed (even more when it comes to my nas) for preventing more support hazzle.

I think that that is to much really, don´t take it so far, If we would have to do this with all products we would have MAJOR problems! But we don´t right? This does however still get my wounder why someone would add a extra layer of complexity(multi- platform) on top of an already complexed environment, but I know we have already discussed that and there is nothing more to say.

Yes a TV could probably result in lag or/and audiosync problems but I have never heard of or worked with TV/Monitor that it is not adjustable to fix it. Its also possible to adjust audio sync from within XBMC if there is a input lag compared to the receiver.

So I have never heard anyone that runned in to problems like this that was not fixable by settings but I suppose that there is examples where its a dead end.

I am not using HDMI on receiver but I suppose that there could be the same audio sync problem if for example the TV have a lot of input lag but as I said, that should be adjusted in XBMC(it works great I know).

I NAS or even the network is also not interested, yes Is may be a problem if its not fast enough but that is general problem that will not only effect XBMC but everything that uses the network or NAS. These kind of problems is often easy to solve (I would think from own experience).

When looking on internet users do almost always only talk about recommendations on HTPC, that would go so far as a remote and a keyboard but not usually NAS or things like that.

We have already seen some recommendations in this threads and they looks good! Its something like that I'm looking for but in a more public way. For example :

We recommend

Small computers :
INTEL DC3217IYE NUC
OCZ NOCTI SERIES 60GB MSATA SSD
INTEL CENTRINO ADVANCED-N 6205
CORSAIR VENGEANCE 8GB DDR3 1600MHZ (2X4GB) SO-DIMM
HAUPPAUGE MC REMOTE CONTROL KIT
MICROCONNECT POWER CORD NOTEBOOK 1M

xbmcbuntu-12.00.Intel

PC Build :
Intel i3 540
Intel BOXDH57JG
ASUS ENGT430
Specific Chassi
Specific Powersupply

Windows 7 64 bits SPX
Specific Graphic driver
Specific Chipdriver
XBMC 12 Win

Yes, I know that its to much to ask, It will be a lot of work to test and recommend setups like that but it would be really nice.

[TugboatBill]

Memphiz - The Mac Mini sounds good until I see "self patched brcm tg3 eth driver". Would a Openelec variant be better for the "not quite so up to date on driver mods" like myself?

[Memphiz]

Nope openelec will fail on ethernet aswell (though i have provided my patch to openelec - no clue if they made anything out of it).

Well i get the same user experience on my other htpc (gigabyte mainboard c2d e5200, 4gb ddr2 ram, onboard ethernet, nvidia gt220 running ubuntu 10.04 - same environemnt all HDMI) - so it doesn't need to be a macmini which is expensive and doesn't run on stock ubuntu (due to lack fo wifi/ethernet support). That's why i wonder why the op has so massive problems. I have really alot of hardware for xbmc (because of my dev work i'm doing) and i didn't really notice anything obvious which would trash my use case in a way like its done for the OP).

Maybe i'm just undemanding enough to be happy if i see the gui - and don't care about anything else beside that? ^^

@snowjm the assumption that network will always work is wrong. For example atv2 is picky a bit when it comes to ethernet. We have users who switched their network hardware components for getting rolling (only problems before - might even be a crappy switch which works in all other normal use cases). So if i want to be 100% sure that someone gets the same experience then me - i have to take into account everything involved. After that it still might be that the user who does this setup calls it crap due to personal taste.

@ned do you feel we should open some section for something like that in the wiki? Still unsure if we should jump on the train for HW recommendations though - i don't want to waste users money.

[Martijn]

I think we should stay away as Team XBMC of making HW suggestions


I have core2 with nvidia 9400 onboard card and so far my experience is smooth (apart from the trial and error experimental builds I run on occasion)

[BartOtten]

@ned do you feel we should open some section for something like that in the wiki? Still unsure if we should jump on the train for HW recommendations though - i don't want to waste users money.

It's also hard to tell as many things have to do with the software setup plus the requirements a users has. Is the Raspberry Pi good enough for XBMC? Many think not, many think it does. Every month there is a new release improving the performance. What is the bargain?

What could be done is some sort of categorization for skins. Light, Moderate, Heavy for example.