I don’t know much about these but I want one.

I’ve seen loads but not sure what I should be looking for or spending.

1, 2, 4gb ram? Dual core, quad core?

Ideally I’d like something I can record with too, but not sure how to go about it.

Any suggestions and experience?

I use a Raspberry Pi to run XBMC for me and stream from a NAS drive. The Pi is cheap to test it out and see if you get on with it.

It doesn’t need to be powerful, it does need an average or better GPU. I use a Laptop which boots straight to XBMC think its 2GB ram and dual core Pentium processor only VGA out but with an HD film its not too bad on a 32″ TV.

I run a HP Prolient Home Server (http://www.ebuyer.com/430446-hp-proliant-g7-n54l-2-2ghz-microserver-ebuyer-704941-421) which you can pick up for around £100 with cash back.

Alongside plex (https://plex.tv/downloads) as a media server which works perfectly with their Mobile Apps & the Plex App on my TV (not to mention DLNA)

Plus Couchpotato (https://couchpota.to/) and SickBeard (http://sickbeard.com/) for acquiring Movie & TV content automatically/easily.

I’ve also heard of Prolient users adding a decent Graphics Card with HDMI for £30ish and running the Plex front end too (although a raspberry pi could be a better option due to quietness plus they’re fun to play with).

Running one of these
http://au.shuttle.com/main/productsDetail?productId=1628
advantage is it’s a full windows box with XBMC running on top so anything that doesn’t work I have a fall back – like on demand for the winter olympics here in Oz and random stuff like on line conferences the missus does for work.

Silent an powerful enough media sourced from a NAS.
HDMI & Optical Audio out.

I use a full size Windows 7 machine to run XBMC. *

It doubles as my ripper/encoder for reencoding my BluRays to a smaller format (come out about 10gb for 1080p with HD audio) which I store on my NAS.

Spec wise it is an AMD 3 core ‘e’ model cpu. 405e or something. 4GB of RAM which is probably over kill. Graphics card is a cheap NVidia passively cooled one.

Remote i have is this (no idea why it is branded both Lenovo and HP, probably fake):
LINK

I am probably going to get an Antec Fusion or SilverStone case to hide it better amongst my receiver etc.

Like this:

I also have a Pi, it’s good, but won’t do HD audio if you care about that. Also the menus and reindexing the library can be a bit sluggish sometimes. Otherwise it’s great and much much cheaper and power efficient. RBEJ’s Openelec builds are the software you want to run on it. So good compared to the main builds.

I have a cheap quad core Android one as well, quite good – a bit more powerful than the Pi but seems less well supported.

* I have a bunch of scripts for use with eventghost which automatically disconnect shares, shut down XBMC, and sleep the machine when the power button on the remote is held for 2 seconds. Then automatically reconnect and relaunch XBMC after it resumes from sleep.

I store all my files on a NAS and watch them using XBMC on a jail-broken Apple TV2.

I went with that option over using my rPi because the ATV2 has Netflix and I wanted to view everything on one box with one remote.

It outputs 1080p at 720p and I don’t believe it has HD audio but neither of those are an issue for me.

RPi + http://www.raspbmc.com + USB stick + USB remote

Works a treat 🙂

I also have a Pi, it’s good, but won’t do HD audio if you care about that. Also the menus and reindexing the library can be a bit sluggish sometimes

I have 2500 HD films, 25,000 MP3s, and about 5,000 photos all indexed by my RPi – it’s certainly not sluggish (NAS + Powerline adapters).

It is recommended you “overclock” the RPi (can be done easily within RaspbMC) for better performance.

I was looking at something like this

http://rover.ebay.com/rover/0/e11070.m1951.l1120/7?euid=99107656536d451a9e91d653ab5b07b9&loc=http%3A%2F%2Fcgi.ebay.co.uk%2Fws%2FeBayISAPI.dll%3FViewItem%26item%3D111253190224%26ssPageName%3DADME%3AX%3APROI%3AGB%3A1120

Is there a buffoons guide to setting up a Raspberry PI as a media player?

http://www.packtpub.com/raspberry-pi-media-center/book

Xiphon how do you overclock the Pi? Ive had one with raspbmc for ages and it works fine whem playing but navigating the menus can be a bit slow.

_tom_ – Member

Xiphon how do you overclock the Pi? Ive had one with raspbmc for ages and it works fine whem playing but navigating the menus can be a bit slow.

Go here and search on the page for Overclocking. Essentially you just change some values in the config.txt file.
http://elinux.org/RPi_config.txt

Some people have posted theirs here to get you started:
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=171623

Beginners guide on a video here:

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cysqPq5Hna0[/video]

mk808 for me.

Online Guide for using the RPi as a Media player is here; MagPi

Within RaspbMC -> Programs -> RaspbMC Settings -> System Configuration -> [scroll down to overclock]

Various “preset” settings – normal, fast, super

It will pop-up and ask you to confirm a reboot – if you say “Yes” – it reboots with the new settings. If you say “No”, it retains the settings, and you can reboot at your leisure.

Ensure you have a decent power supply first (most common issue), and secondly – that RaspbMC is installed on a USB stick (as overclocking often corrupts the SDCard).

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzpJDHqvt3o[/video]

My RPi is set on ‘Super’ and it’s rock solid – and rapid fast.

(I’m also about to give it another speed boost too, using Root NFS… but thats another story)

Interesting. I just run stuff off my usb hard drive so I dont have the spare usb ports to run it off a usb stick at the minute! Do usb hubs work with the pi?

xiphon – Member

Within RaspbMC -> Programs -> RaspbMC Settings -> System Configuration -> [scroll down to overclock]

Various “preset” settings – normal, fast, super

It will pop-up and ask you to confirm a reboot – if you say “Yes” – it reboots with the new settings. If you say “No”, it retains the settings, and you can reboot at your leisure.

Ensure you have a decent power supply first (most common issue), and se

That’s a cool feature, haven’t see that before.

Have you tried rbej’s openelec builds? Sooo much faster than the stock binaries.

http://openelec.tv/forum/124-raspberry-pi/58671-my-custom-builds-openelec

Thanks for the link to the book – is there something on-line (free) that’s just as good? The link above looked okay then it went off into “Raspbmc installs from a downloadable Python program” and so on which may as well be in Greek as far as I’m concerned!

Actually this one looks quite simple:

http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/desktops/how-to-turn-your-raspberry-pi-into-an-xbmc-media-centre-50008599/

There’s quite a few step by step guides out there. I think i used this one: http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/desktops/how-to-turn-your-raspberry-pi-into-an-xbmc-media-centre-50008599/

This one looks OK too; http://mymediaexperience.com/raspberry-pi-xbmc-with-raspbmc/

Basically buy a pi and an SD card and have a go. You can’t really break anything.

For those of you using RasBMC you could try OpenElec – looks exactly the same but is much faster on the menus.
I;ve run both and settled on OE. No overclocking required.

@retro83
I use that exact Silverstone case (ML03) in my set up and can recommend it. Blends in perfectly with the AV gear in my stand.

Also the menus and reindexing the library can be a bit sluggish sometimes

I use a cron job running at midnight to re-index the libraries so I don’t need to wait for it to do it when I want to watch something. Works well.

I used to use windows media centre but fancied a Change so went xbmc plus argus TV as a back end TV recorder. I’m not too sure about xbmc yet – argus TV is superb, though. I can use it to stream live or recorded TV to all my devices (windows, android)

Well I followed the guide above and got it running nicely (after being sat on my shelf for two years!), I even managed to get the wifi dongle to work.
The only disappointment is that the remote control app wont work on my 2nd gen iPod Touch. It works fine on the iPad and Iphone 4 though.

If you want to record too I’d look at mythtv – been running a box for about 8 years now.

1.6Ghz single core atom + ion does HD freeview fine, up to recording 2 channels at once (on same multiplex) + playback, very low power.

Just FYI, if you’re using a pi bear in mind that they are still really bad at doing DVD menus (from backed up dvd iso files).

I’m not anti Pi (I own 4) and they seem to play everything else well (and openelec is the best pi version at playing menus on SOME dvd isos) but if like me you have many dvd isos (1000 plus) then its a deal breaker.

Any android versions of XBMC have the same DVD menu issues (which is a shame when (like me)you are looking for small cheap xbmc box).

For non pi/android options look at this thread on the XBMC hardware forum.

I have personally built (from the link above) The number 1 windows box and bought (arriving this w/e!!) the NUC based number 1 openelec box.

Also FYI if you are a netflix user you will want XBMC on a windows platform.

Then you get to try to decide what remote to buy(?) (helpfully the guy who started the thread above has info on that too)

For remotes, the microsoft MCE remote version 1 works nicely with everything easily IME.

More info than you wanted to know about MCE remotes:

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/MCE_Remote

Running XBMC on a Pi here..connected up via HDMI and my panasonic remote for the telly also controls XBMC with no drama.

It’s all CEC so presumably a Sony Bravia would work as well

I think there’s a CEC addon you have to enable in XBMC.

As I understand it the Pi will struggle with the fancy UI stuff with XBMC. But it’ll do the media playback well, which is the important bit.

I just built a new box with an i5 intel NUC. it rocks along. You may need to disable the full intel harware accelaration – the drivers don’t do VC1 codecs. It was a labour of love to get everything setup “just so”, but in combination with windows 8 (no explorer running), booting straight into XBMC and a Harmony remote it nearly feels like a consumer STB.

Luckily I don’t have any DVD iso’s, all my films are straight rips or downloads.