[blatantninja]

Vertigo, awesome write up! I think you have sold me on at least giving this a shot!

- the Pi is not always fast enough to transcode DTS or Dolby Digital 5.1 (AC3) to stereo on the fly, but it has no problems passing through these codecs over HDMI to a DTS or AC3 decoder/receiver. If you have an HDMI receiver (or TV) that allows these audio codecs, you will be fine (the work is done by the AVR decoder). If you dont have that hardware, there isnt too much point in using a DTS track, so if possible, you should select a stereo or AAC track instead. Most DTS/AC3 media will have such an audio track.

I am woefully ignorant when it comes to audio, so I have some probably basic questions.

1) DTS and Dolby are listed there, but can XBMC on the Raspberry Pi handle TrueHD and DTS-HD? I would just be passing through on HDMI to a TV (that handles them) or AVR.

2) If the answer to 1 is no, does XMBC automatically select a different audio track that it can handle?

One more little known feature of the Pi that deserves highlighting, is its built-in HDMI CEC capability. Unlike any x86 videocard Im aware off, the Pi can send and receive HDMI CEC commands. This allow you to use the remote of another HDMI CEC compliant machine, like TV or AVR to control XBMC. On x86 you can achieve the same only buy purchasing a Pulse-Eight adapter kit. HDMI CEC is also known as Easylink, Vierra Link, BRAVIA Sync, Anynet+, etc.

This is really great, but again a question: Is this functionality working in XBMC? I would love to just be able to use my TV remote (Its a Samsung with Anynet+).

- The network interface is 100T.
Even using USB to Ethernet adapters, you will still be limited to 100T. It wont do gigabit ethernet.

100T should be enough for video though I would think.

Thanks again for this write up!