[doucettom]

Hi,

I just wish to tell my story as I first start reading about XBMC 2 weeks ago and I finaly made the move this week-end building a box with spare parts and hooking it to a leftover Asus LED 22" to use in a bedroom. I used OpenELEC.

Here is what I used:

• MSI K8MM-ILSR motherboard
  
• Athlon64 3000+
  
• 2x1gb RAM PC3200
  
• GeForce 6200 AGP8X
  
• SoundBlaster Live! Digital 5.1 (will come back on it later)
  
• Lexar 16GB nano USB flash drive
  
• Asus 22in LED PC Full-HD monitor
  
• Logitech Wireless keyboard
  
• Altec Lansing VS2121 2.1 speaker set
  
• Cheap used mATX case
  
• 2x Zalman Fanmate to control fans speed
  
• TP-Link TL-WR703N with DD-WRT used as a wireless bridge (will come back on that later too)
  

PROS+++

• Free
  
• Nice GUI
  
• Pretty easy to install
  
• Boot really FAST
  
• Still quite reactive even if hardware is far from being new
  
• Easy to use the base functionnalities!
  
• .strm worked out of the box as soon as I figured out I was packet losting and fix that "trouble"
  
• Am able to stream my favorite radio station pretty easily and with quite good sound quality (as good as in my car...)
  

CONS---

• VIA IDE Bus Controller not recognized (Means no DVD drive !)
  
• AC'97 Onboard Audio not recognized, had to use a Creative SB Live! instead
  
• D-Link DWA-525 was packet losting like crazy, had to use a wireless bridge, don't know the cause yet... This causes me A LOT of troubleshooting
  
• No Netflix support (this is really pi..ing me off TBH)
  
• Broken Amazon Instant Prime add-on, seemingly due to DRM addition
  
• I have been unable to use Hulu in Canada, except for the ads !
  
• LOTS of TV streams aren't working as well (Canada On Demand, FreeCable etc...)
  
• Little to no French content found
  

So here I am so far, I am still looking for a reliable way to rent movies online even if I live in the "plus best country in the World: Canada" and would like to find some ways to see live channels stream, especially Canadian channels and even more especially French Canadian channels ... I also wished to fix some other little annoyances as well but I lacked time to do so during the week-end.

A special Thanks for BlueCop for his hard work giving us great add-ons and thanks for reading and am looking up for comments,

[darkscout]

The first 3 are more of an OpenELEC thing. I bet they disable IDE on purpose or don't include those drivers.

[Martijn]

For french content perhaps look at passion-xbmc

Not working streams is not XBMCs fault

[doucettom]

The first 3 are more of an OpenELEC thing. I bet they disable IDE on purpose or don't include those drivers.

I posted over there too to get some help, I don't wish to appear rude against XBMC, I am just reporting feelings after a week-end of usage.

For french content perhaps look at passion-xbmc

Not working streams is not XBMCs fault

I know about streams not being XMBC's fault, currently it's not that much of an issue for TV streams. Not being able to find something like Netflix that just works on XBMC's under Linux is my main concern right now as it is the main reason why I built that box, Amazon Prime seemed very promising but the honeymoon ends up quicker than I wished to kinda ! I don't have that much video and music content on hard drives and I need to cleanup and put them on the FreeNAS box as well before using them !

[DaMizZa]

I'm in the same boat, and I've sent countless emails to Netflix about Linux support and raised the issue every survey I've done for Netflix. Unfortunately Linux support for Netflix isn't looking good, and the best I've come to hope for is that someone figures out how to hack it (either legally or illegally) to work. Since the CEO of Netflix is on the Microsoft board of directors and all, I don't see it happening anytime soon..

[Ned Scott]

Netflix says they plan for a Linux client, but has yet to even give an ETA. Very fustrating, indeed.