Super low power usage XBMC setup
#16
Dont have any ETA for next pivos box..., but i'm pretty sure it's the best choice for android box.

For Nuc, it suffers for me with a few problem :

- advanced deinterlacing (which will be solved with haswell)
- 24p (which will be solved with haswell)

So for myself i decided to wait for the next NUC which will be i'm pretty confident (again ^^) the killer htpc.

Also, do you plan to get TV physically on it (in this case you will have to go for a x86 box)? Do you need infrared remote controlle/bluetooth ?

For an x86 build you could look on the Zotac website.

To resume, here an extract form Openelec site :


1 Power Usage, to get a cool and also silent experience
2 Video Codec support to decode video content on the GPU, here we talk mostly about h264, VC-1, mpeg2 and mpeg4/xvid.
3 Bitstream Audio Support, e.g. TrueHD and DTS-HD
4 LiveTV watchers also need accelerated deinterlacing to get their 1080i and 576i TV-Streams decoded properly.

Intel supports items 1, 2 and even 3 since a long time. One remaining problem was the deinterlacing support, to get low power chipsets like the Celeron 847 into being a multitalent. This point was ruled out lately. Timo Rothenpieler (Btbn) a longterm vaapi enthusiast implemented the first deinterlacer within xbmc for vaapi by using the VPP (Video Postprocessing API). It was possible by the changes introduced into libva and libva-intel-driver by Haihao Xiang. In the future, we will also deliver Temporal / Spatial deinterlacing, that has just been released for Intel Haswell. The Haswell Chip is actually already supported with our new vaapi driver packages, Temporal / Spatial deinterlacing will come later (if we find some hardware to actually test it).

With all this work being done, Intel delivers a really great experience on Linux htpcs, and closely moves into the direction where Nvidia has been best the last couple of years. Thank you so much, to all people that have tested the Intel VPP work in the special thread over at our forums.

"
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#17
I wasn't planning to put the TV into it no. My Samsung TV does a gorgeous job with 'normal' TV and I have to say, the quality of the image is superb. I dont see any reason to try replace this with some software that probably does an inferior job.

So would probably just be for mp3 playback and compressed BluRay disc playback.

Potentially later down the line add in a collection of 40k photos but that'd pretty much be the limits I think.
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#18
(2013-07-02, 08:14)nila Wrote: Been reading this forum a bit more and have discovered two other options that both sound like they would be more powerful options of what I want.

Pivos and the Ouya systems?

Can anyone say if these are the best options for a silent, low powered system that I can leave running 24/7 and get smooth, library using XBMC setup?
Thanks

Hi,

I just received my Ouya and to me it is a bit slow with XBMC for the moment (using an alpha build), and the Android build still have some limitation (HD audio passtrough for example), but if you use it for music only it could be alright..
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#19
Did anyone compare the video decoding of the G-Box Midnight MX2 in xbmc vs the one in the raspberry pi ? Is it as good ?

As I find the raspberry pi to give excellent hardware video decoding (yes the cpu is too slow, you have to overclock it), none the less, the picture on h/x264 is one of the best I've seen.

I've not seen any HTPC x86/x64 gpu that can decode it is as good.

Also can the G-Box Midnight MX2 handle 24hz ? As it seems to be an android problem of not supporting refresh rates other then 60hz Huh

Tnx
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#20
I've used Android (MK808B, among others), RaspberryPi (currently run 2 Raspbmc's) and x86 (my primary XBMC instance).

My advice: if you can afford it then you'll have the best experience, by a good stretch, with x86. The NUC is great, or you could build your own in a slightly larger format, possibly saving a small amount of money. And if you're careful you can build one that consumes less than 20 watts at idle, especially if your content is stored on a NAS. I don't know how much your energy costs, but the difference between the 3 watt raspi and an 17 watt x86 machine is very likely between $10 and $20 per year when running 24/7. And you'll be blown away by how buttery smooth it is.

My raspbmc's have been rock solid and they play the content beautifully. But sometimes it takes literally minutes to load my movie library, and that's using the default skin. So it's not necessarily going to be acceptable to everyone, but still an amazing little $35 device. Really amazing actually.

I think Android shows a ton of promise, but the various devices seem to be stuck at "80% of perfect" for the better part of a year now (for no fault of anyone around here). It's probably not ready for someone who wants a perfect XBMC experience.
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#21
Could you give details of that x86 configuration? Thanks
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#22
(2013-08-30, 13:37)awp0 Wrote: My raspbmc's have been rock solid and they play the content beautifully. But sometimes it takes literally minutes to load my movie library, and that's using the default skin. So it's not necessarily going to be acceptable to everyone, but still an amazing little $35 device. Really amazing actually.

How many movies do you have? I can enter movies view in 6.0s with 1300 movies on Pi (latest rbej builds have a patch that improved that from 9.3s)

The good news is we are working on this issue, and hope to improve this more.
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#23
(2013-08-30, 13:55)popcornmix Wrote: How many movies do you have? I can enter movies view in 6.0s with 1300 movies on Pi (latest rbej builds have a patch that improved that from 9.3s)

The good news is we are working on this issue, and hope to improve this more.

I want to say somewhere around 300-500 movies? I'm not in front of it right now, so I can't check.

My experience surrounding performance has been mixed. Sometimes the list loads fairly quickly, and sometimes it just hangs there for quite a while. My usage on raspbmc probably isn't representative of most people's. This is my bedroom XBMC instance, and I rarely use it, but I do keep it on 24/7. So a week could go by with it just sitting idle, and then I turn on the TV and start browsing movies (without a restart or anything like that). I only mention this because if there were any kind of a very small memory leak then it would manifest in my environment more so than most people's. That said, I've never bothered to run "top" or anything like that to see what changes with regard to resource usage.

Btw, please don't take any offense to my comments. I'm super impressed with raspbmc and I fully enjoy using it. I love that install/update framework that it runs on, and the fact that it's continuing to get better and better. Pretty amazing actually.

(2013-08-30, 13:40)nila Wrote: Could you give details of that x86 configuration? Thanks

Mine is not purpose built for low wattage, but I did keep that in mind. It's an Intel i3-3225 with 8 gigs of RAM and a small SSD drive for the OS. It runs Win2012 and it uses the CPU's integrated graphics (HD4000 I think?). My content drives are local on the computer, so that increases the power usage substantially, which is currently around 35 watts at idle. I have 3 spinning drives though, so without those it would be much lower.

If I were you, looking for performance at low cost and low wattage, then I might look at a Celeron system running Openelec. I'm sure you could find some good build examples on this forum. You could "try" Openelec quite easily with a flash drive and then decide whether it's right for you. With x86 you have a lot of OS options.

Edit: be sure to analyze the Celeron limitations. If memory serves, it doesn't support certain things like 3D? I'm sure some of the other posters could provide the detail.
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#24
Hi all.

My idea is to have a Linux server set up with NFS for movie shares etc, then have ltsp on that server and use the raspberry pi as thin clients for streaming. I will have a gigbit network through out.

Have any of you guys tried this?
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#25
(2013-09-19, 17:23)adam_2218 Wrote: Hi all.

My idea is to have a Linux server set up with NFS for movie shares etc, then have ltsp on that server and use the raspberry pi as thin clients for streaming. I will have a gigbit network through out.

Have any of you guys tried this?

I did that using this guide but I found performance (thumbnail loading, list browsing) was too slow for me compared to a USB stick for booting. Though your network is gigabit (mine too), the pi only does 100mpbs (12MB/s) and that is slower than most USB 3 flash drives (I get ~24MB/s on my pi with a USB 3 flash drive). If you're fine with slower browsing in the GUI, playback of media (bluray too) works well.

With that said, there are a few performance enhancements coming up that are supposed to make loading libraries faster. Try both methods out and see which you like better.
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#26
there is no reference to LTSP on that post
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#27
Have you considered a simple i3-3220 with a HDMI-USB3.0 motherboard? Should fit all your requirements...
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#28
(2013-09-20, 16:32)adam_2218 Wrote: there is no reference to LTSP on that post
Let's see...Does the OS reside on the server with the method I referenced...Yes. Okay, then. It's thin client. Is it strictly LTSP, no. but if xbmc is somehow running on his client, then the performance issues I mention are relevant.
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#29
sorry maybe its my understanding of what a thin client is. But I thought that just cause the os is on a hard drive on another machine does not mean its a true thin client. The whole point of the LTSP is that the os and most of the cpu and ram job are done on there server. Where as I guess the ram and cpu jobs are still done on the raspberry pi when using NFS?

If im wrong, which im sure I am im just looking for clarification

(2013-09-21, 01:54)doug Wrote:
(2013-09-20, 16:32)adam_2218 Wrote: there is no reference to LTSP on that post
Let's see...Does the OS reside on the server with the method I referenced...Yes. Okay, then. It's thin client. Is it strictly LTSP, no. but if xbmc is somehow running on his client, then the performance issues I mention are relevant.
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Super low power usage XBMC setup0