Video of latest xbmc code on Raspberry Pi
#61
(2013-09-29, 12:37)MediaPi Wrote: Although I commend the Raspberry Pi and use one as my main HTPC source. In terms of hardware its already being beaten on price and performance. The quad core boxes are selling for around £50. Your optimising it to the death and by the time your finished you can pick up a quad core beast that will cost the same or lower and have GUI performance x8 minimum. Whats the point in optimising it when consumers will just jump ship. All they care about is price/performance. and all your efforts will have been for nothing??
I couldn't disagree more. Have you considered the resource wastage of moore's law filling up landfills everywhere with year after year of junk? Ever seen videos of the illnesses kids inherit in the third-world junk heaps where child labor is used to extract any traces of precious metals still available in our 'first world' junk?

Here's one example:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/11/0...9229.shtml

In addition, does XBMC even support multi-threading and or GPU acceleration in all these newer boards you are referring to? The Pi's can be used for more than just XBMC but everyone needs recreation time in between figuring out GPIO, I2C and all that stuff.

Furthermore, how many of the boards you refer to have such a high-quality, inexpensive camera add-on module available? With that module, it's foreseeable that all the little Pis out there can become HDTV-top video chat platforms. Whilst that may not be done through XBMC, why couldn't it be? The pi has built-in h264 encoding!

Speaking of codecs, how many of those 50 pound boards come with codec licensing for $5 each? Those extra cores may decode various codecs without licensed dedicated hardware decoding but how much extra power do they use to do it?

There's nothing wrong with optimization. It's purely lazy to rely on hardware upgrades. That produces situations where the software could full of bitrot and crash left right and centre which is exactly what XBMC formerly used to do. It's bad enough that XBMC targets over half a dozen platforms that distribute developer load instead of focusing on one, but if you also throw 'good enough' code quality on the latest hardware into the mix, it's just irresponsible in my view.

And then there's the old simple fact: popcornmix and others are optimizing because they want to, and they can!
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Messages In This Thread
RE: Video of latest xbmc code on Raspberry Pi - by raspberry_pd - 2013-10-01, 18:08
RE: - by godson - 2013-10-13, 00:29
USB 2.0 vs. Class 10 vs. USB 3.0 - by xbs08 - 2013-12-13, 11:56
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