[lockdown571]

IMO, everyone should try OpenELEC before installing Windows. It's free and so painless to install that you really have nothing to lose. OpenELEC also seems to be the better choice for almost all of your needs.

[Vertigo]

IMO, everyone should try OpenELEC before installing Windows. It's free and so painless to install that you really have nothing to lose. OpenELEC also seems to be the better choice for almost all of your needs.

+1
No reason not to try openelec or xbmcbuntu. If it doesnt work, or you cant make it work, or you dont want to spend any time learning how to make it work (assuming it doesnt in the first place), you can always shell out the money and install windows.

[Vertigo]

After countless fruitless attempts to install openelec, Ive finally found the cause: gigabyte motherboards! Their crappy bios's just wont boot just about any stick, and as it turns out, both my main PC and my HTPC have a gigabyte motherboard. Oh man.

So, I booted the stick from my laptop, and installed openelec on an external drive. Admittedly, the beta wouldnt work (partitioning failed), but the stable version took less than a minute (!) to install and its absolutely awesome. All the issues I had with ubuntu+XBMC are gone. No more HDMI handshake issues. Resuming through USB? Now it works. I dropped in a broadcom wifi card and feared the worst, but nope, it just works. Booted the external drives on both nVidia and ATI based machines, it just works in both cases. No driver hassle, no configuration. It boots in a blink of an eye and seems even more smooth than before. Best of all, I can take it everywhere. Im very, very impressed with it.

Long story short: forget xbmcbuntu. OpenELEC is where its at.

[LordByron]

I have a Zotac ID80 (I preferred Nvidia over ATI for the video card) with a 64GB SSD and 4Gb of RAM. At the beginning I tried Openelec and it was running pretty good but if you need some "special configuration" you need to prepare yourself to study a little bit on forums and edit some config files. For example, I needed to edit conf files for two main reasons : 1) my plasma accepts 1080P but with Openlec the max resolution was 720P 2) the Zbox has hdmi and spdif for sound output and I need to use both , hdmi for stereo and spdif for ac3 and dts.
Then I tried Windows 7 64-bit and I choose to stay with that : easy installation, easy to update drivers and edit hardware configuration, with an SSD the boot process and XBMC are still very fast. I'm able to use 1080P without any work on my side and with Frodo I'm able to use hdmi sound and spdif as desidered without configuring anything special, just use the system preferences in XBMC. In addition I can use the Zbox also as a normal PC to browse the internet and other stuff and if I connect an USB blueray drive, I'm able also to play protected movies.
Summary: Windows 7 gives you more flexibility and an easier configuration , with Openelec your htpc will be dedicated only to XBMC and you need some reading to modify the configuration files.

[Vertigo]

Summary: Windows 7 gives you more flexibility and an easier configuration , with Openelec your htpc will be dedicated only to XBMC and you need some reading to modify the configuration files.

There is no disagreement with your statement that Openelec will turn your HTPC in to a, well, dedicated HTPC. Thats the whole point . Whether Id call that harder is quite a different matter. With the extra possibilities of a full blown OS come all the associated headaches (security, management, performance, software updates, "kill the popups", reassigning the green button on MCE remotes, etc). To each their own, but if I wanted a full blown OS and browser, Id certainly opt for ubuntu over windows.

As for configuring openelec; honestly, the files are automatically accessible through a shared folder that you can access remotely from any PC in your network. I think thats rather brilliant and IMO beats the pants out of fighting windows control panel while sitting on your carpet with a strained neck, keyboard on your lap while moving a mouse over a magazine or something.

Granted, if openelec doesnt run out of the box the way you want it, for most users it will require some google-fu to find what exactly you need to do (eg, second hit on google, I found a proposed solution for your audio problem http://xbmcnut.blogspot.be/2012/08/how-t...sound.html ), but on the 4 machines I tried openelec on so far, the only issue Ive encountered is one that is shared on all OS's, namely occasional HDMI handshake issues when the TV or AVR is turned off/on.

As the saying goes though, YMMV.

---

- Configured my Harmony 550 remote to control the ZBox. My ZBox model (AD04-PLUS-U) was not in the Harmony database, so I used ZBox Nano AD10 for the device model. That got me 95% there.

Is that a windows MCE compatible remote? If so, try configuring it as such in my.harmony. You need to select Microsoft as vendor and then MCE as device. Worked perfectly with my Harmony 700 and Acer/MCE remote.

[Vertigo]

- One aspect that I have found very frustrating so far is that since i'm using an external HDD (though I put in my order of some more HDDs today to set up a UnRAID server!), if I disconnect the HDD to add more media, when i've reconnected, it has not recognized the library, and I have to try and re-mount the HDD etc.

Dont disconnect the drive while the HTPC is running. Its not a good idea, unless you want to risk corrupting the data. Either copy the files over the network (you can access the external drive over the network by browsing to windows network > openelec/media/yourhdd. If thats too slow for you, Id strongly encourage you to turn off the htpc before disconnecting the drive.

- Bluetooth Keyboard. Allegedly, Bluetooth works with the AD10, but looking online, it seems rather complex to get BT pairing set up, and requires some unusual add-ons and tweaking. The keyboard I have is a HP TouchPad Wireless Keyboard

As I recently found out, bluetooth input devices are by default disabled in openelec. The functionality is disabled deliberately, something to do with supporting the PS3 controller. There is a way to make it work, its actually just a minor change of a config file but, its a config file thats on the read only file system, and the solution is therefore not for the faint of heart, requiring to unpack and repack the system files. Instructions are here:

http://wiki.openelec.tv/index.php?title=...ols_how-to

[protocol77]

Thinking about asking Santa for a Zotac ZBOX-AD04 to replace my old AppleTV 1. Trying to decide if I want to run XBMC via Windows 7, Openelec, or XBMCBuntu. I'd like to hear others' opinions on which option would be:


- Require the least tweaking to get working
- Most stable
- Have the best performance
- The most set it and forget it solution
- Most likely to work best with future XBMC updates
- The easiest to update when new versions of XBMC are released
- Work well with a Harmony remote

In short, which would provide the most trouble-free operation?

Thanks!

you basically described everything openelec is

the only downside to openelec is lack of built in browser but there is an addon for opera browser (wish there was a chrome one though)