[maul0r]

Good Evening,

I am quite new to xmbc but as far as I have read, this seems to be a great system. So I am thinking of using the live version of xmbc on a nettop in my living room. Prior to buying hardware for this, I have some questions that you may be able to answer?

1) I have a Linksys E4200 router which does dual W-Lan. I would like to use that however I havent found any build in W-Lan modules that support this technology. Would dual band usb sticks work on the live version? (driver support, configuration)
2) I am an iphone user. Therefore I would like to connect a dock to my xmbc box and I would like xmbc to play whatever I have on my iphone (or other people's iphone) and as a bonus control that using my remote (much like most all-in-one home theatre systems with an iphone dock. Is that possible? If so what specific hardware do I have to use?

Thanks for your answers in Advance (hope this hasn't been asked to often before, I did search before i posted)

- maul0r

[maul0r]

I found this zodiac product - sounds great for me

Adding enough ram should give one the possibilty to create a ramdisk and get that xmbc live running on it !?

Will blueray playback work using xmbc live?

http://www.amazon.de/Zotac-Barebone-PC-D...381&sr=8-1

[Orclas]

Seeing that you haven't received any replies yet I'll share what I know/think. Don't take it as the truth though, I'm quite new to XBMC/Linux OS myself.

Network
I don't know if you intend to do so, but there are serious challenges streaming anything above low/mid res content/music over WLAN. I do have a functioning setup with Netgear's WNHDB3004 bridge, but that's over a short, open air, distance. It's not the actual bandwidth which is the challenge, it's the stability and lack of drop outs which is key.

This review explains the basics of this and smallnetbuilder.com may be a good start for forming a view on whether it's viable or not to stream HD with your gear.

iPhone
Don't have one myself, but if you can set it to act as a portable drive, that should be a good start. Why don't you just fire a Live session up, plug in the iPhone USB cable and see what happens? I think a plain iPhone cradle will act and present itself as "just an iPhone connected via USB cable" and in such case above test will answer that part.

Blueray
Do read the FAQ in the Wiki, it states quite clearly that "No. There is not yet any C/C++ open source software out there yet capable of fully playing back Blu-ray or HD DVD so we can not add the code from somewhere in any case.".

As for regular HD content, I play 1080 mkv's flawlessly on my Shuttle XS35GT (version 1), and it's pretty similar to Zbox.

Hardware & RAM-disk
Then you're kinda mixing things up. You can either boot Live CD/USB "demo mode", which will make it run entirely from a RAM-disk (since there may no other writeable media installed), or you install it on a USB drive or HD (from the Live CD/USB).

The previous does not let you save any settings at all, since those are written to the RAM-disk and any power cycle will make you loose the settings and you'll start from scratch again (including WLAN PW and the works). In short, it's for demo/test use. With the latter settings are saved, which you will want for regular use.

[xbmc old school]

Not an expert but i would watch out on the amd. The playback can be buggy at 1080p. The playback seems to be best with an Ion/d525 setup. With amd you can put a windows OS on it but the frames start to drop with such a big OS, or with ubuntu the playback is smuggy because there is no driver support.

Personally i'm holding out for a the next Gen Zotac Nano that comes with a remote and maybe not an amd setup. Zotac has amd/intel versions of every other setup they have.

Check out the OpenElec Page for a lean linux install.

[Orclas]

Aye.

As mentioned, my XS35GT plays streamed 1080p flawlessly (I'm talking 0 frame drops) on XBMC Live (and it's a D510/Ion2, whereas the XS35GT currently shipped is v2 with a D525, same GPU).

Dunno how it would do on top of Win7, but given that most decoding is done by the GPU, my guess would be that it may work (1080 playback on Live uses only about 10-20% CPU iirc).