[allan87]

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. It's that kind of thinking (using faster processors as a crutch for inefficient code) that is saddling many of us with applications that are sluggish on fast machines. This includes many commercial applications that ought to be much more responsive than they are.

An illustrative example that I think is close to home is the very limited GPU support in mythTV. I have a semiretired 2009 macbook running mythbackend. It has a much more powerful CPU than a Pi and a GPU that is more than capable of playing back HD content, as long as you are using something other than mythfrontend. The backend has no GPU support at all, which would help with, among other things, commercial detection. The general view in the myth community seems to be the same as yours: "Who needs a GPU when you can make up for its absence with a faster computer."

You also have to respect someone who clearly finds it engaging to make something work better.