[wayner]

Any other software package (MediaPortal, MCE, SageTV) would not come close to offering the inexpensive clients and wide platform support of XBMC.

Can you expand on this? Since the death of SageTV 6 weeks ago many of us SageTV users are looking for new options. The great thing that SageTV had was an extender that sold for $150 that could give you almost all of the functionality of SageTV on a PC - I have six of these in my setup. What is there that is a similar inexpensive client for XBMC, ideally that is small and is totally silent?

These extenders are very popular in the Sage community and are now selling for a huge premium on eBay since they are no longer available from Sage.

[seand]

Can you expand on this? Since the death of SageTV 6 weeks ago many of us SageTV users are looking for new options. The great thing that SageTV had was an extender that sold for $150 that could give you almost all of the functionality of SageTV on a PC - I have six of these in my setup. What is there that is a similar inexpensive client for XBMC, ideally that is small and is totally silent?

These extenders are very popular in the Sage community and are now selling for a huge premium on eBay since they are no longer available from Sage.

The Apple TV2. $99. No license required.

[wayner]

The Apple TV2. $99. No license required.

I thought the Apple TV2 can't play back MPEG-2 files - is that correct?

If so that is a huge drawback.

[IsleOfMan]

ATV2 can't hardware-decode MPEG-2, which means playback of HD MPEG-2 files will not be smooth. SD MPEG-2 is smooth for me even without hardware decoding. Since the lions share of XBMC users aren't using it a PVR (yet), HD MPEG-2 isn't a high priority for most of us. As a PVR client, I can obviously see the benefit of HD MPEG-2 decoding.

If you're looking for another SageTV HD200, I happen to have one like new in box... shoot me a PM.

[joemm210]

Actually VLC can play RAR files now.

I just tried to play some of my rar files with vlc, and they do not play so either you need some sort of add on or there are settings that you need to change before you can play a rar file without extracting. xbmc just works so thats why I just use that.

[wayner]

ATV2 can't hardware-decode MPEG-2, which means playback of HD MPEG-2 files will not be smooth. SD MPEG-2 is smooth for me even without hardware decoding. Since the lions share of XBMC users aren't using it a PVR (yet), HD MPEG-2 isn't a high priority for most of us. As a PVR client, I can obviously see the benefit of HD MPEG-2 decoding.

Does the ATV play back DVD rips properly? The lack of HD MPEG-2 is definitely an issue for people who use OTA tuners.

What about H.264 files from an HD-PVR or Colossus - can it handle these?

Is there any way to offload the decoding to a PC that would feed a stream - kind of like PlayOn?

[IsleOfMan]

Does the ATV play back DVD rips properly? The lack of HD MPEG-2 is definitely an issue for people who use OTA tuners.

I've tested a couple of VIDEO_TS rips and playback was perfect. I haven't tried any .ISO rips, but I'm sure someone can chime in there.

What about H.264 files from an HD-PVR or Colossus - can it handle these?

Unless they're approaching BD-Rip bitrates or have some strange encoding anomoly, they should playback fine via hardware decoding.

Is there any way to offload the decoding to a PC that would feed a stream - kind of like PlayOn?

Possibly through the PlexBMC add-on along with a PlexServer running on a PC. PlayOn also has a local media playback feature (Beta) but the image quality wasn't that great when I tested it a year or so ago.

[dtviewer]

Standard def iso rips play perfectly.

[cami]

I just tried to play some of my rar files with vlc, and they do not play so either you need some sort of add on or there are settings that you need to change before you can play a rar file without extracting. xbmc just works so thats why I just use that.

sorry to take this off topic folks

No addons and default settings
open the player and drag either the first(part01.rar) or the last rar file onto the player itself. Voila!

demos of it working
http://www.uploadgeek.com/image-4664_4D652710.gif
http://i51.tinypic.com/2exn514.gif

[dsimages]

A friend of mine turned my onto digital content a few years back. Showed me what a Western Digital WDTV was and what it could do for me so I decided to get one and throw it in the living room (my theater, for now). Within hours I was downloading gig's of movies and tv shows, the torrent flavor, and before too long I was finding myself watching less and less cable Tv.

Once my media library increased in substantial size, I decided to ditch the dish and just stick with downloading content. With the help of B-Rad I was hacking the WDTV to serve up some metadata and cover art. This was a PITA and did last long.

Long story short:

I came across XBMC in the process of hacking the WDTV, took an old P4/nvidia based PC and filled it full of XBMC love . Moved away from XBMC and started using MC7 because of PVR support and I was still getting local cable (before all digital move). Then moved back to XBMC when cable went all digital.

I am currently still downloading HD movies, SD TV shows (automatically updated with MCM), viewing live TV streams via LiveStream Addon (for news and cartoons).

With a little help from me (downloading movies and inputing new tv show series titles) I am able to watch whatever, whenever, comercial free, and yes of course, for FREE.

[wayner]

AWith a little help from me (downloading movies and inputing new tv show series titles) I am able to watch whatever, whenever, comercial free, and yes of course, for FREE.

How do you watch live sports that is only available on channels like ESPN?

[cami]

How do you watch live sports that is only available on channels like ESPN?

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=100031

[okie]

Because it does everything I want and using a remote to control it is just kickass! And since it's based on ffmpeg it pretty much plays anything you throw at it. Not to mention that you can customize it a lot with themes and add-ons.

tl;dr: It roxors my boxors!

What remote do you use?

[bazwalt]

Hi,

I've been using XBMC on a XBox for years and it has served me well. Especially as we've been moving to different countries a lot the last couple of years, not only could we watch whatever we wanted whenever we wanted (duh), but also play our music over the tv speakers.

Only thing is, the XBox is getting to the end of it's lifetime and as we're moving to central asia within a few months, i thought it better to replace it now.

So i'm looking into options and think i just buy parts and build a PC myself. But then i started wondering: why would i want to keep on using XBMC?
- we hardly ever keep what we watch (ie most is deleted after we've seen it)
- we don't care much about the quality; i think our tv is HD capable, but HD quality doesn't run on our XBox and the avarage quality of xvid's we watch tends to be good enough (in the sense we don't percieve it as being 'bad' or 'worse than'); As the DVD player in the XBox is broken, we've not watched any DVD's for the last year or so and don't really miss it either; again an avi usually is good enough.
- the hifi stuff is being shipped over, so no need for an audio library/audio device

On the other hand, simply running windows with VLC full screen would probably work just as well. Moreover, lately i have run into a couple of avi's which don't play on the XBox, but do play on the PC. But that probably is remedied with a new version of XBMC on an up-to-date system.

Come to think of it, the only really big advantage of XBMC over VLC is A/V/Subtitles sync, which is really easy to adjust with XBMC and a bit harder with VLC.


Just being curious on your thoughts. Why do you keep using the extra XBMC software layer on top of your OS?


Cheers,

BobbyR

BTW: it is likely i'll end up running XBMC anyway for the simple reason i like how it looks.

The point of XBMC is that it's meant to give you the "Home Theater" experience. It's meant to centralize all of your media content into a large, easy to read, aesthetically pleasing system that is remote friendly.

Having a computer in your living room (or wherever) running VLC is pretty backwards imo and doesn't really make for an easy and relaxing time.