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Comment by etherealG | Hacker News Reader

The Pi makes a fantastic media center when combined with XBMC.

"Fantastic" may be overstating it. I've been running Raspbmc for about 15 months now, and although the video rendering is very good, the XMBC UI is a bit laggy and unresponsive (although there seems to have been an improvement recently). I've also used it as an SFTP client and to run a few light cron jobs (rock solid there).

Given the price, I am pleased with it, but I wouldn't recommend it as a media center for the non-tech savvy.

If you're willing to spend quite a bit of time configuring XBMC it runs smoothly. I use openelec with the theme 'bello', any animation heavy themes will kill it straight away.

You should try Openelec[1] instead. It's much more lightweight and less bugs imho.

1 - http://openelec.tv/

Agreed. I wish that RPi has some kind of cheap prebuild of a mediaplayer. If would be GREAT for non-techies if it just had a real power on/off switch, IR sensor & a basic remote that just works (probably asking for too much there).

I reckon you could fix the lag of the GUI if someone implemented Raspbmc/OpenELEC with Wayland instead of X-server. Not much has to change for this to be possible. Only the power switch & IR sensor would have to be apart of it. Remote could potentially be third party and WBMC would a man hours issue.

It seems Wayland support for XBMC was merged last October[1]. Not sure if it will benefit on RPI.

1 - http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTQ4NDE

A little bit of an overclock, use SD as boot only with a fast USB stick and things work real snappy.

I've found SFTP to be horribly slow. I would recommend FTP instead so that the CPU doesn't need to do encryption.

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