[goldcd]

Firstly a bit of backstory.
I chipped my Xbox years and years ago to allow me to play games and emulators. One day I found XBMP and I was dumbstruck. It was wonderful and made me happy. As XBMC continued, I continued to just get happier and happier - and I've reached the point today where I don't believe I could get any happier.
Almost.
I've got a 4Tb ReadyNas on my network with all my DVDs ripped to ISOs. I've got all manner of flashy stuff on my main PC for ripping, downloading anything I want to watch and my old Xbox is now stashed under the big-ass TV nicely shoving stuff put onto my NAS onto the screen. Problem I now have is that my trusty old Xbox just really isn't up to it any more. 700Mhz celeron and smidge of RAM no longer can cope with the HD wonder XBMC dutifully tries to present me with.
Looking around here everybody seems hell-bent on porting XBMC to every system under the sun. Now I'm sure that's fine for some people, but it's not what I want.
What I would like is just having precisely the same experience I have now, just with a bit more grunt and requiring as little effort on my part to manage as possible. Ideally XBMC would sell a small silent box I could just swap out my Xbox for - but suspect the lovely hobbiest developers aren't wanting to leap into hardware manufacture/flogging (I swear I'd pay big if anybody were tempted)
Next alternative would be if XBMC were licensed to hardware maufacturers. Not hard to find a DVD player with Divx stamped on the front, nice, but I'd pay a damn sight more for a nice XBMC logo. Has anybody ever talked to Neuros?
Third and more realistic option would be a micro-roll of linux with just enough stuff to support XBMC. I could live with picking up micro VIA or similar system and just installing an XBMC Live CD onto it and then never having to touch it (I love autoupdate). I want the OS so light I don't even have an HD, but can just boot the whole kaboodle off a lovely quiet SD card.
In summary I don't want XBMC on OSX, Vista, or Linux - I want XBMC on my TV where it belongs (VLC works fine on a complete OS). Whole project seemed to do so well due to the hardware constraints forced upon it and thrived and seems a shame to see it splinter and lose direction.

Anyway, that's enough from me. I've never contributed, so I don't expect anybody to actually care too much about my wants. All I can say is that I am willing to pay - I've spent the last year or so trying to hunt down some replacement for XBMC on my Xbox and with money in my hand have never found a worthy replacement. Surely I can't be the only one?

[goldcd]

Thing that reminded me about the above was

http://www.myka.tv/techspec.html

Looked at the specs and thought "ooh that looks about right" - but then the fact it wasn't XBMC clouded my mood.

[Jezz_X]

Simple reason is People want to do it (by that I mean coders contibute their free time and code because they want it on those platforms)
Second reason Xbox is dieing if we don't move ahead we will die with it
Third Reason the world is moving to HiDEF xbox an't handle it
Forth Reason Because hopefully by the end of the linux version you wont even notice the difference in the to the xbox version it just may take a little longer to boot

[Jezz_X]

Thing that reminded me about the above was

http://www.myka.tv/techspec.html

Looked at the specs and thought "ooh that looks about right" - but then the fact it wasn't XBMC clouded my mood.

Thats an ugly arse little box that relies on a format that will probably die out and get you arrested I prefer XBMC Linux version on somthign like this
http://minipc.aopen.com/Global/spec.htm

[d4rk]

Third and more realistic option would be a micro-roll of linux with just enough stuff to support XBMC.

In summary I don't want XBMC on OSX, Vista, or Linux - I want XBMC on my TV where it belongs (VLC works fine on a complete OS).

The original intent of the Linux port was (and still is) pretty much what you are describing, i.e. to be able to install it in such a way that when the computer is turned on, it will boot into XBMC. But obviously, XBMC still needs an underlying OS to manage the hardware (even on the Xbox, XBMC runs on top of Microsoft's OS). A port is necessary to make that happen. Most of the changes in the port are at the layer where XBMC talks to the OS. BTW, all the ports, Linux, Mac and Win32 are based on the same code and are the same code. The core and probably 90%+ of which is still the Xbox code. That's why, if you've noticed, in none of the ports, are there any OS specific "features".

Obviously for a solution where you press a button and in a few seconds you're in XBMC, a custom version of Linux would be obvious choice since neither Windows or OS X support that level of cusomizability (AFAIK). Hence, the initial choice of Linux. While doing the port, the devs decided to use libraries that were mostly platform independent, which resulted in more people taking the initiative to port it to other OSes. All in all, it's a good thing, since the more OSes XBMC can run on, the better. Not everybody would want to use XBMC in the same way as you and probably most other currently use it. There are clear advantages of also having your OS of choice along with XBMC.

[rodalpho]

Computing power is cheap, and getting cheaper every day. Opensource is the way to go. It costs $450 or so to build a XBMC/linux box today, but that cost will continue to drop dramatically until a computer on a chip can handle it. If neuros or whoever wants to use XBMC it's opensource so they're free to do so as long as they distribute any changes they've made to the sourcecode.

[hazeh]

I think I could make my own machine that looks much nicer than either of those two you guys posted or I could buy a mac mini, never used one but they look pretty damn neat (they're small) - That's the point you're after mr original poster man!

The potential to run the best media center software on top of all the major os' whenever you want it, or the option of stripping it down to boot off solid state, live in a shoebox case under the tv and still have the base of a massively advanced os to play with - Can't see commercial products ever catching up with the oss flexibility, hq and attention to 'the right' detail of xbmc, and I can run it on my own hardware??!

[goldcd]

with pretty much what everybody has said. Couple of points:
I hadn't actually thought that as this was OSS somebody else could just pick it up and use it. i.e. it wouldn't have to be pushed from XBMC, it could be pulled in by a hardware maker.
Also I do understand how people want to integrate this into an exisiting linux system. Point I was trying to make was that I don't want to have a whole house full of complete systems, need to draw the line somewhere and just treat some as appliances. e.g. it's entirely possible to use linux to build a nice NAS box - but for a device with such a clear purpose I just chose to pick up a ReadyNAS. Maybe not cheaper, but certainly easier.
Currently there an an awful lot of flavours of Linux out there, all running all manner of hardware under the hood and combined with the joy of linux drivers I suspect the user experience might be slightly more 'fiddly'. Maybe as mentioned the solution is just to make the linux port and then settle on a reasonable standard supported platform - a Mac mini would be fine for me.

[goldcd]

I prefer XBMC Linux version on somthign like this
http://minipc.aopen.com/Global/spec.htm

That looks perfect.

[roeroe]

You may want to check out this much cheaper and more powerful.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2008/03/04/a...g_chipset/

I'm in the process of looking at putting together a 780G machine for XBMC

[smcnally75]

You may want to check out this much cheaper and more powerful.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2008/03/04/a...g_chipset/

I'm in the process of looking at putting together a 780G machine for XBMC

That looks sweet!

[embrion]

It's gonna be sweet with HW acceleration of decoding. Without it, cheap AMD cpus sukcs and better ones are more expensive than Intels

[Razor_109]

And it runs ATI for the graphics.. not recommended by the dev's.. HW-acceleration is still far off on linux.. and even support for ATI on linux is quite crappy i think..

So you might wanna go with the Nvidia Based bords

[apanloco]

Does that really still apply when ATI has release all documentation for their gfx chipsets (although quite recently no allowing for much devving perhaps)? Even 3D. I would look this up before deciding what to go for.

[xgrep]

Does that really still apply when ATI has release all documentation for their gfx chipsets (although quite recently no allowing for much devving perhaps)? Even 3D. I would look this up before deciding what to go for.

nvidia had a few years head start in support for linux, so even though ATI as done great recently with releasing things to linux there's still lots to be done to catch up.