[HunterZ]

I havent read the full post as I'm in airport killing time, but a quick one, can the Acer Revo support SDHC? I see all SDHC for sale on amazon say not backwards compatible with SD, and my Revo doesnt say SDHC on the slot...?

Mine doesn't say SDHC either, but it appears to support it nonetheless. My card is a Transcend Class 6 8GB Micro SDHC in a micro-to-full SDHC adapter that was included with the card. I've been able to boot XBMC Live 10.1 and Clonezilla-SysRescCD from it in the Revo without problems, except of course for slow boot time. Then again, I was also able to use it with an old multi-card reader in an old Athlon 64 X2 system (my headless Linux workstation, running Xubuntu 11.10 x64). I think computers may have an easier time with reading SDHC, as the SD interface controllers are probably able to be driven mainly by software that knows how to deal with SDHC.


Anyways, XBMC Live seems to be working fine from the HDD now. I'm not sure whether my database import was failing to match up with the sources list due to a capitalization difference in the server name, or due to my having embedded name:password info in the source smb:// URLs. In any case, things seemed to work fine once I got it all matched up better (no duplicate entries on subsequent database update, and the Info screen was available for all movies that I tested).

I also did some tests to ensure that SPDIF-passthru was working with the HDMI output after I had tinkered with things to get the menu sounds back, and it was indeed working. As with Windows, I have XBMC configured for 2.0 speakers even though I have 5.1, as I prefer to have my A/V receiver perform Dolby Pro Logic II decoding on stereo streams. This works great, as 5.1 audio is passed through as pure AC3/DTS and piped directly to the speakers, while 2.0 audio is passed through as PCM and decoded to 5.1 by the A/V receiver.

This morning I got MySQL syncing working with the XBMC Live install, with the MySQL server living on my headless Xubuntu 11.10 x64 Linux workstation (and installed via apt-get instead of from the MySQL web site). After following the setup instructions in the XBMC wiki, I experienced problems with XBMC accessing the MySQL server that I eventually realized were due to the wiki not instructing me to set the password for the 'xbmc' database user. Fortunately a Google search popped up a helpful result on the MythTV wiki that helped me fix that issue.

I noticed that library access is slightly slower when the library is stored on a MySQL database on a remote server on the LAN, but this is to be expected and is not bad enough to noticeably detract from my end-user experience. I do seem to have lost some (but not all) thumbnails/fanart along the way, despite having also enabled thumbnail syncing per the XBMC Wiki article. This is a minor issue, however, and I've been working on restoring these manually via the XBMC GUI.

Quick summary of XBMC Live versus Windows XBMC impressions:

• XBMC Live doesn't work with HDMI OOTB (out of the box), as it seems to mute some of the digital outputs by default in the ALSA mixer.
  
• XBMC Live does not support menu sounds over HDMI by default, and needs some tweaking (that is not documented in the wiki as far as I can tell, but is murkily documented on the forum). Windows XBMC supports this OOTB.
  
• XBMC Live boot time is much faster than Win7+XBMC (even with XBMC set as the Windows shell instead of Explorer.exe), unless booting from an SD card.
  
• XBMC Live works better with MCE Remote OOTB, although my Windows experience was possibly tainted by poorer OOTB support in Windows XBMC versions prior to 10.1. If nothing else, it's nice the big green MCE button returns to the home screen by default in XBMC Live, and I don't need "remote sends keypresses" enabled (which causes problems when entering passwords with '0' in them on Windows).
  
• The ability to connect to XBMC Live via SSH/SFTP for remote administration purposes is very handy. Windows 7 Home doesn't even allow Remote Desktop, UltraVNC was very slow due to the Atom CPU, and I had to move the XBMC GUI out of the way to do anything remotely.
  
• Contrary to what I've read, XBMC Live doesn't seem to have any additional hardware control options compared to those offered in the Windows version. Both versions offer the ability to power off / suspend / hibernate / reboot etc. and not much else that I can see.

I'm a little more worried about trying to upgrade XBMC Live once Eden is released. Hopefully there will be a robust in-place upgrade process, but I suppose it won't be a huge deal to reinstall now that my database is stored on other machines on the LAN.