2013-11-19, 15:24
I'm sorry if this is cluttering the forums, just wanted to say thanks to the XBMC team for all their hard work and excellent product.
A little history in order to put things into context: I own a PopcornHour C200, which was "upgraded" to a Dune HD Duo, and after a while here's my experience with these dedicated boxes:
At first it seemed reasonably convenient to have an appliance that took care of my media center needs, sporting 2 HD bays in case of the Dune. Media playback was OK, as was compatibility with several media types, and conectivity was quite reasonable. But there are so many annoying little things inherent to these boxes, at one point I started to look for alternatives and I'm glad I did. I'll summarize a few from the top of my head just so XBMC users realize how good they have it:
- The "rewind" function in the Dune simply *does not work*. How's that for basic functionality screw up?
- Fast forward eventually crash both players, more so on the C200 than the Dune.
- Even using "green" HDs, these players have such poor ventilation you're going to end up frying one every 1-2 years - they run hot enough to cook rice
- Customization is very, very limited - you're basically stuck with whatever skins and plugins are available from the manufacturer, unless you hack into their software (which I did BTW)
- As soon as a new model is about to be released, both companies intentionally cripple their previous ones and stop firmware updates in order to force customers into buying the newest thing. This is a particularly hateful business practice that makes me never want to buy anything from them, ever, again.
- Dedicated boxes usually have mediocre hardware, good enough for playing videos but very little else. Which brings us to the next annoyance...
- Featureset is very limited. For instance, media indexing has to be done by external software (to be fair, the C200 has an internal indexer, that takes 3 or 4 hours to index what XBMC does in less than 3 minutes), subtitles have to be downloaded and uncompressed manually, and although both players could resume play, there was no visual indication either of new shows/movies nor watched ones.
I confess besides being upset with Syabas and Dune, my motivation for putting together an XBMC box was that I just *love* building and configuring computers. Went with the latest (13.10) version of Ubuntu and the latest stable version of XBMC (Frodo) in a Haswell i3 with 4GB RAM, a 64GB SSD system HD and 7TB of storage divided in 3 disks. I find XBMC to be very, VERY stable, with the exception of a few WMV files, everything works flawlessly.
The first things that struck me when I fired up XBMC for the first time were how fast it loaded (partly because of the SSD drive I suppose) and how nice it looks. Then media indexing, which is insanely fast and efficient in XBMC (haven't had a single miss so far), and I'll confess when I realized I could have the latest episodes of my shows downloaded automatically and download and install subtitles so easily I started laughing to myself. To complete my experience, got a cheap MCE remote and configured my Harmony 880 to work with the USB receiver, and now I'm thinking I own the best HTPC I could ever wish for. Even my girlfriend was very impressed and said it was "money and time well spent".
So here's a big THANK YOU guys - I will donate as soon as I get home tonight, can't do it from work
A little history in order to put things into context: I own a PopcornHour C200, which was "upgraded" to a Dune HD Duo, and after a while here's my experience with these dedicated boxes:
At first it seemed reasonably convenient to have an appliance that took care of my media center needs, sporting 2 HD bays in case of the Dune. Media playback was OK, as was compatibility with several media types, and conectivity was quite reasonable. But there are so many annoying little things inherent to these boxes, at one point I started to look for alternatives and I'm glad I did. I'll summarize a few from the top of my head just so XBMC users realize how good they have it:
- The "rewind" function in the Dune simply *does not work*. How's that for basic functionality screw up?
- Fast forward eventually crash both players, more so on the C200 than the Dune.
- Even using "green" HDs, these players have such poor ventilation you're going to end up frying one every 1-2 years - they run hot enough to cook rice
- Customization is very, very limited - you're basically stuck with whatever skins and plugins are available from the manufacturer, unless you hack into their software (which I did BTW)
- As soon as a new model is about to be released, both companies intentionally cripple their previous ones and stop firmware updates in order to force customers into buying the newest thing. This is a particularly hateful business practice that makes me never want to buy anything from them, ever, again.
- Dedicated boxes usually have mediocre hardware, good enough for playing videos but very little else. Which brings us to the next annoyance...
- Featureset is very limited. For instance, media indexing has to be done by external software (to be fair, the C200 has an internal indexer, that takes 3 or 4 hours to index what XBMC does in less than 3 minutes), subtitles have to be downloaded and uncompressed manually, and although both players could resume play, there was no visual indication either of new shows/movies nor watched ones.
I confess besides being upset with Syabas and Dune, my motivation for putting together an XBMC box was that I just *love* building and configuring computers. Went with the latest (13.10) version of Ubuntu and the latest stable version of XBMC (Frodo) in a Haswell i3 with 4GB RAM, a 64GB SSD system HD and 7TB of storage divided in 3 disks. I find XBMC to be very, VERY stable, with the exception of a few WMV files, everything works flawlessly.
The first things that struck me when I fired up XBMC for the first time were how fast it loaded (partly because of the SSD drive I suppose) and how nice it looks. Then media indexing, which is insanely fast and efficient in XBMC (haven't had a single miss so far), and I'll confess when I realized I could have the latest episodes of my shows downloaded automatically and download and install subtitles so easily I started laughing to myself. To complete my experience, got a cheap MCE remote and configured my Harmony 880 to work with the USB receiver, and now I'm thinking I own the best HTPC I could ever wish for. Even my girlfriend was very impressed and said it was "money and time well spent".
So here's a big THANK YOU guys - I will donate as soon as I get home tonight, can't do it from work
