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Hello,
First post, and I wanted to get a feeling from some of the regulars or other newbies to XBMC on which version is right for me.
I'd like to have something that would work well with my HT setup (Onkyo AVR-888) and Samsung 46" 6 series (1080p). I don't have blue ray (yet) and am thinking of building a small form factor HTPC to run everything. Since I am starting out from scratch hardware wise, I was hoping for some general thoughts on where to go. I am a relative newbie to Linux (played with Ubuntu for a bit, but am primarily a windows user (though willing to learn).
So, what do you think; Live, XBMC for Win, or XBMC for Linux? I am thinking Live from what I have read up on so far but am a little leary of hardware setup in Live since I am relatively new to linux.
Barret
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XBMC's overall goal is to be platform agnostic. Pick whichever you're most comfortable with. Just be aware that XBMC is still quite new to this whole PC thing and development is always in flux, so some platform may step ahead of the others temporarily.
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If you are comfortable with Windows, use it. As the man sez, you aren't losing anything. Even if you want to know more about Linux, XBMC is not a good place to start, since you'd never know when something goes wrong if it's a Linux thing, a XBMC thing, or a user thing. If you want to learn Linux, get an old desktop and stick Ubuntu on it. Then you can explore without having to worry about something breaking. An HTPC is something you want to work all the time.
That said, looks like the Linux rev is gonna have GPU accel for Nvidia, so if yer hankerin for a small box that doesn't involve a 3GHz CPU (read: Ion), then may be a crash course in Lin is in your future. Er, no pun intended.
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I'm not sure but it's very doubtful seeing as how you have to plug the USB Bluetooth stick into a USB slot, and I believe the xbox does have one. Also, I think it's
Add to run with with does (at least that's what the drivers are for) so it's doubtful.
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So far I've tried the Linux, Windows and Xbox version of XBMC.
Aside from the softmod portion (which was actually quite simple) - the xbox version of XBMC has been easiest for my family to use and has also been the most stable & reliable of the three. It worked so well that I bought a 2nd xbox on ebay for the same purpose. The xbox remote that comes with the DVD kit works ok - but lacks buttons for using all features. However, the media center remote that comes with the old 2005 extender kit for xbox works really well right out of the box.
On Windows, I have it running fine on an Acer Aspire Netbook with Windows XP (using Icons SVN build Rev19317) - which is hooked up to a 32" Samsung flat screen in our bedroom. I'm just using a wireless keyboard with trackball for navigation, but plan to set it up with a spare media center remote laying around so it is easier for my spouse to use. I've also been meaning to install event ghost so I could map some of the media keys on my keyboard that aren't being recognized by XBMC.
On our main HTPC running Windows 7 build 7000 - I had much less luck. Overall it was buggy, unreliable and required a lot more time to maintain and troubleshoot. I tried several different SVN builds by Jester and Icon...however, I kept running into issues with xbmc running slow, freezing or some videos in our library returning codec errors (which was odd, because our entire library is encoded with xvid/ac3). I spent a week or so troubleshooting, but ended up reverting back to the default Windows 7 media center because my spouse (who doesn't share my enthusiasm for such things) was impatient and annoyed with the problems. I figured most of the issues were due to the beta of Windows 7.
On Linux, once I actually got my hardware running properly in Ubuntu (video card issues), xbmc itself ran fine - but I couldn't get any of my spare tuner remotes working with it (using Lirc). In the end, I abandoned that project for lack of time - though hope to tinker around again with it when my workload isn't so high. Most of my frustration with the Linux version was due to my own inexperience with that platform.
All in all, I'd recommend the xbox version for ease of use. You just turn it on and it works. You can set it up so xbmc is the default dashboard...which means all your family would have to do is press the power button on the xbox. It has also been the version I've spent the least amount of time troubleshooting.
Next would be Windows, but more because I'm new to Linux and am less familiar with the command line way of doing things. As mentioned above, Windows XP worked far more reliably than Windows 7. I can't vouch for Vista, as I didn't even bother trying to install it on my Vista 64 box.
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But no HD in the Xbox version, even though it is the best.
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natethomas
Enjoying Retirement by Staying Busy
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I'm surprised you had problems on Windows 7. Particularly codec problems, as those really are platform independent. I'm curious what caused all that.
I currently run XBMC on Vista and Windows 7. With each new revision, things work better and better. These days, the only problems I have tend to be internet based. Occasionally, if I can't get a connection to thetvdb, things foul up, but I'm guessing that's true for everyone.
