[dbug]

I've just found out about XBMC a week ago after cutting my cables and it is the best thing ever and started using it on my pc which is attached to a plasma TV in the living room and loving it. I just ordered a Revo ar3700 for my bedroom to run XBMC but I've noticed that many people are using XBMC Live instead of a regular windows installation. What is the difference and is Live really much better? How? I don't know linux so installing it on Windows 7 is good for me because I need to have Playon.tv running in the background. Thanks

[jhsrennie]

I don't know linux so installing it on Windows 7 is good for me because I need to have Playon.tv running in the background.

two good reasons for sticking with Windows.

Live is designed to work like an appliance, so it boots fast and does nothing but run XBMC. Everything not needed to run XBMC has been stripped out.

JR

[bodhi]

two good reasons for sticking with Windows.

Live is designed to work like an appliance, so it boots fast and does nothing but run XBMC. Everything not needed to run XBMC has been stripped out.

JR

@JR,

How do you start up your XBMC? I like Win 7 with XBMC, and usually putting the HTPC to sleep while XBMC is running. Once in a while it causes some problem for XBMC while waking up. Perhaps anti-virus and Windows Update is the cause? I don't run anything else that could try to grasp focus. Or could it be a XBMC bug? I'm thinking about turning of anti-virus and Windows Update for a while to see if the problem go away.

-bodhi

[jhsrennie]

On my real HTPC (as opposed to the several test machine!) I run XBMC from the Startup folder.

I never put the HTPC to sleep. If I'm not going to be using it for a relatively short while, e.g. an hour, I just leave it (and XBMC) running. Otherwise I shut it down.

Having said this, there have been various reports of XBMC failing to run properly after a resume from suspend, though lots of people have no problems with this. I think there are so many hardware variants out there that it's impossible to test everything without spending a fortune on hardware. This is where Apple win of course, because their developers know exactly what hardware their apps has to run on.

JR

[bodhi]

On my real HTPC (as opposed to the several test machine!) I run XBMC from the Startup folder.

I never put the HTPC to sleep. If I'm not going to be using it for a relatively short while, e.g. an hour, I just leave it (and XBMC) running. Otherwise I shut it down.

Having said this, there have been various reports of XBMC failing to run properly after a resume from suspend, though lots of people have no problems with this. I think there are so many hardware variants out there that it's impossible to test everything without spending a fortune on hardware. This is where Apple win of course, because their developers know exactly what hardware their apps has to run on.

JR

Indeed, hardware variants is the reason Windows needs to be tuned to work properly, unlike Apple. It's annoying sometimes when you have to resort to use the keyboard to fix the problem with XBMC waking up. But most of the time, it's great when you can resume exactly where XBMC was last time :-)

Now if we can make XBMC to remember the last place it was in, then we can just shut it down before telling Windows to go to sleep, and start it clean the next time (using either Harmony remote activity or other universal remote macro, so it's all done with one button). I'm thinking of the XBMC Shutdown command. Perhaps that's where a resume marker can be written to userdata area, and users would have an option to resume to that place? i.e. last movie, music file, add-on, or menu position,...