[kamina]

I need a mediaplayer to transfer all my families dvd's (before the kids destroy them), ease watching tv recordings and store clips obtained from elsewhere. After looking at the alternatives and even owning a playon!hd for a week I am starting to feel xbmc might be the right solution.

I'm thinking of purchasing an Asus EB1501 to run xbmc, but before pulling the trigger I would like to ensure I have made the right assumptions. I hope you forgive me for asking things which are probably already awnsered elsewhere, but upon browsing the forums some things seemed complicated enough that I prefer making sure before delving any deeper. Sorry if my English is not very good or I don't know the correct technical terms for things...

1. My kids and wife will be using the device a lot for watching kids movies and recordings. I want to edit the main menu so it's not "videos" -> "music" -> "photos" etc, rather "kids videos" -> "tv recordings" -> "other stuff. So the idea is to get all the families stuff one click away. Looking at the skinning forum I got the understanding that all the menus are configured with xml files and this is pretty straight forward?

2. I have a phillips 9000 series tv and quite like the remote. It has buttons to change the device you are controlling (tv, dvd, satellite etc). If I get a infrared sensor could I use my existing remote and configure xbmc to respond as one of the extra devices? I saw some threads showing how people where configuring remotes, but how to find out what the remote is outputting?

3. I imagine I can install extra packages like rsync to mirror all the video's to another disk, sftp etc?

4. I have some extra elgato usb tv tuners. Has anyone set it up so the record tv shows with the same box?

5. Anything I'm forgetting. My main worry is that my wife starts nagging. I really want it to be as simple as using a dedicated mediabox for the rest of my family, so it starts directly to the gui (from sleep preferably), and all underlying stuff is invisibke to them. I've used linux quite a bit (though not graphical desktops or multimedia), so I'm not really worried about having to tinker around to get started.

[BLKMGK]

I will take a stab at some of this. For starters your choice of hardware appears to be excellent - dual core ATOM 330 and ION graphics. Playback in HD shoudl be doable and if it's got HDMI it should also be able to do sound as well.

The remote - yes it is posisble to customize responses to IRDA commands. You will want to research LIRC and you will want to find out what sorts of signals your remote can send as it seems there are some types of signals that aren't compatible but I suspect, if you're familiar with Linux, that this will be doable for you.

Main menu - yes it can be customized. You may even be able to use the Shortcut functionality to make it easier although I've not used it myself. In my case I have multiple video shares setup under Video where one can goto say standard DVD, HD DVDs, or some other source - this would be easier but perhaps not as intuitive.

Depending upon how you install yes RSYNC and other Linux programs should run fine. You may want to fool around with a LiveXBMC install but installing on top of a full Linux desktop might work best for full Linux functionality. You can still boot right to the XBMC menu and if that box is anything like my ASROCK 330 you can even flash the BIOS to have an XBMC logo :-)

No one I know is recording on an XBMC box, it's not the target functionality as I understand it. That would be reinventing the Myth wheel - use a Myth backend for recording and you ought to be fine. Still a work in progress with integration I believe.

Speaking of backends - if you're going to store much in the way of media forget keeping it on the head unit. Build some sort of a server, I use unRAID, and put it all there. Make the front end as slim as you can IMO... If you've forgotten anything I'd say that's it - the laptop drives put into these small machines just don't store enough!