2014-12-03, 06:59
Whoa whoa whoa, someone hating on the Raspberry Pi in here?
In early 2014 a bunch of us went to SCaLE (Southern California Linux Expo) and ran an XBMC booth. We demoed various things on our main big screen TV, such as the video library, 3D, fantastic playback quality, music, add-ons, etc. People were amazed at how well everything ran. They asked us what device we were running on, and we pointed to a little Raspberry Pi Model B running OpenELEC. They wouldn't have known if we had not told them.
I'm completely realistic when I say I use XBMC/Kodi daily on a Raspberry Pi. I don't have a problem with reading up on the articles, since that's pretty much how you learn some of XBMC/Kodi's best features :P
The netbook market didn't actually go away, they just got taken over by tablets who filled the same casual web-browsing niche. Technically speaking, they also still exist in the form of Chromebooks (and are awesome).
That couldn't be further from the truth. Pi-inspired improvements most often improve all the platforms, and nothing has been hampered by including the Pi. If we stopped supporting it then there would be some other low-powered device that we would use as a minimal target. Our devs choose a minimal target based on practical application, and not just some random selection that they pull out of their butts.
There is huge value in hammering out the potential of a device like this. Not only is there a huge community of support, and a massive community of users to test things, but it's also a device with a phenomenal video processor. It's the perfect target for that minimal line, and it will be for at least another year or two, if not more. When it's time to move on then our devs will move on. This is one of the things I tend to trust them on.
(2014-12-02, 09:27)Dark_Slayer Wrote: As far as "drawing a line" through something goes, I thought it was time to do that within a month of the RPi announcement. That little junk pile got so much love from the net, but it was never ready for primetime. It feels like a shame to see so many of them sold. There were even articles that amounted to "Top 5 things to do with your RPi"
In early 2014 a bunch of us went to SCaLE (Southern California Linux Expo) and ran an XBMC booth. We demoed various things on our main big screen TV, such as the video library, 3D, fantastic playback quality, music, add-ons, etc. People were amazed at how well everything ran. They asked us what device we were running on, and we pointed to a little Raspberry Pi Model B running OpenELEC. They wouldn't have known if we had not told them.
Quote:Of course, XBMC was always at the top of those lists, but let's be realistic . . . when you buy hardware because it's cheap and marketed towards the "fiddler-friendly-community" but end up needing to read articles telling you what to do with it - what was the point? It's like the short-lived netbook boom. They were cheap, easy to find deals on, had better battery life than other laptops at the time, but sucked majorly due to a severely memory constrained FSB architecture built by Intel. There were tons of articles telling you how to turn them into file servers, music servers, etc. The same story really . . . cheap hardware in search of software.
I'm completely realistic when I say I use XBMC/Kodi daily on a Raspberry Pi. I don't have a problem with reading up on the articles, since that's pretty much how you learn some of XBMC/Kodi's best features :P
The netbook market didn't actually go away, they just got taken over by tablets who filled the same casual web-browsing niche. Technically speaking, they also still exist in the form of Chromebooks (and are awesome).
Quote:Rather than drawing a line through the RPi it's instead been embraced, and XBMC as a whole seems to be responding to it. There's a whole support subforum for it. It would be one thing if the changes were "streamlining" XBMC to where every platform benefits, but instead it feels like some of the needed development that could take place is becoming hampered by the question "How will this work on an RPi?"
That couldn't be further from the truth. Pi-inspired improvements most often improve all the platforms, and nothing has been hampered by including the Pi. If we stopped supporting it then there would be some other low-powered device that we would use as a minimal target. Our devs choose a minimal target based on practical application, and not just some random selection that they pull out of their butts.
There is huge value in hammering out the potential of a device like this. Not only is there a huge community of support, and a massive community of users to test things, but it's also a device with a phenomenal video processor. It's the perfect target for that minimal line, and it will be for at least another year or two, if not more. When it's time to move on then our devs will move on. This is one of the things I tend to trust them on.
