XBMC with OpenElec

Firstly. Wow!  I was really impressed at how easy this was to build (not quick, mind), and also with the performance of the thing itself once installed...

I followed the instructions at OpenElec (parts 1 and 2) on a fairly vanilla Ubuntu installation running on Parallels on my mac.  It took a few hours to build (I went to bed, so not sure how many hours!) but had no errors whatsoever, and the instructions were perfect (I used GParted to shortcut a few of the command line partitioning steps in part 2, but that's the only thing I did differently).

Boot time the first time around is around 2 minutes, after that, it takes about a minute or so to boot.  It doesn't connect the HDMI port unless it's on during boot, which is a little annoying, but not the end of the world (I wonder if this can be fixed with a cron job checking for connectivity or something else?).

The XBMC interface runs pretty quickly, though between screens it takes a while (likely due to swap use, though I've not looked at what it actually does to the system during running yet).

Network browsing again is slow (i.e. listing large video plugin lists), but acceptable, and adding a UPNP source works just fine.  Doesn't seem to decode from Windows Media Centre; going to look into this later.  I'm pretty much decided that this will be my media centre of choice though - once I've figured out a way of getting BluRay and surround sound in my lounge without the PC. Hrm... :)

Kudos to OpenElec for getting such a useable and solid system up and running so quickly after release; let's hope it goes from strength to strength.

Media stuff

So, I think that the Pi is likely to work well as a Satellite decoder, but unlikely to be able to cope with more than sticking that data onto disk / across the network.  So what I'm thinking of is:

• Use my routers (I have a pair of Buffalo WZR-HP-G300N/NH boxes running dd-wrt) as file servers with one or two large USB drives.
• Get one of these which according to the Linux TV wiki is supported on Linux - I will endeavour to compile the drivers on arm first of course, before I commit to buying one of the boxes!
• Build myself a PoE adaptor for the Pi - apparently (see FAQ) the team are going to think about providing support out of the box, but right now a small adaptor is easy enough to build, providing I can build it to also power the satellite adaptor...
• Mount the Pi, the Satellite adaptor and PoE adaptor in a decent waterproof enclosure with suitable weatherproof ethernet connectors.
• Find a good way of mounting this enclosure somewhere on a satellite dish mounting.
• Think about support for two of the satellite adaptors - not sure if that'll work on one Pi, so, I'll get another one!

What does the world think?  I think this is a good solution for media providing you have a NAS somewhere in the house...  Obviously there are currently quite a few unknowns around performance of the ethernet interface (100BaseTX may not be enough for a single HD stream (is 72 Mb/s the right figure?), let alone two, but it's worth a try...