Good time to get a Raspberry Pi for media?

[Rob_B]

I've been pondering it for ages and I have a friend who swears by his pi.

I've recently finished with netflix and almost bought Amazon prime to get lovefilm (but I looked at the selection and thought it was terrible) so I'm considering one.

For an outlay of under £50 for the pi/SD card and maybe a keyboard it looks decent. Does anyone have one and use xbmc on it?

All i know is that I need a model B and time/patience to get it setup.

Any suggestions?
Cheers!

Rob

[jim]

I had one with XBMC on it. Well, I still have it, but I don't use it.

It worked, but I found everything to be frustratingly slow, and spent way more time configuring it than actually using it. Cataloguing and indexing media was the primary difficulty.

If you were just looking at streaming, perhaps it would be better, but I now have a Smart TV that connects into Netflix/iPlayer, and a Sky HD box that performs similar functions as a backup, so have no need of XBMC for those purposes.

[Rob_B]

Hmmm...i do already have my ps3 if I wanted to do catchup etc.but I do like to tinker!

Fancy selling yours?

[Woodentop]

I have one running XBMC and also find it a little slow in the menu's, very easy to setup thou as plenty of people use the PI as a media player.

[virtuo]

Mine (first run 256Mb version, overclocked) runs Xbian, if you pick a simple skin for it, it runs very well. The heavier themes are a bit too much for it though. used the XBMC remote app for android to control it.

I streamed everything from my NAS over Gbit LAN, the Pi wouldn't stream 1080p stuff over wifi without stuttering, but cabled in it was perfect.

It's been demoted to the bedroom now, but still gets regular use.

[herulach]

those of you with xbmc on them, have you tried it with the library on another machine?

[jim]

What do you mean herulach? You mean connecting an XBMC-equipped Raspberry Pi to a library on a NAS?

[herulach]

No, with the database hosted on an sql server elsewhere on the network. Thats how mine is set up, as I've never been able to get a reliable windows UPNP player, and like the watched status being updated.