Anyone here run a HTPC?

Post by **Gayno** » Thu Apr 04, 2013 1:42 pm

Ammo wrote:Have you noticed if you have Yatse installed on your phone/tablet if you play a video from facebook etc you can play it on your tv rather than your android device

NO!

How does one make it do that?

Post by **indigolemon** » Thu Apr 04, 2013 1:55 pm

Click the video link, and choose yatse as the program to play the video - it passes it to xbmc

Post by **Gayno** » Thu Apr 04, 2013 8:28 pm

Aces! Didn't know as I'd set my defaults so it didn't prompt. Can see it now!

It did crash my XMBC when I tried it, but it is running on a dog slow PC at the moment!

Post by **Vtecmec** » Thu Apr 04, 2013 8:37 pm

The thing that irks me about XBMC is the inability to show music as album/artist, with MCE7 you point it to your music folder and 5 minutes later you have this:

With XBMC it will only seem to show a folder for each artist with the albums hidden inside, which has crappy fan art as thumbnails that takes an age to download. Is there another way?

Mr Lemon, I find the Pi a bit slow with Openelec, is that what your running? (or raspbmxc?), and which skin?

Post by **Ammo** » Thu Apr 04, 2013 9:34 pm

I think Indigo is on the same as me and on Xbian although he has changed the skin to a lightweight one

Post by **Gayno** » Thu Apr 04, 2013 10:51 pm

Have just tried installing OpenELEC but it's failing to boot. Will look more into it over the weekend.

Confused · Post by **Confused** » Fri Apr 05, 2013 10:28 am

Did you install the YouTube plugin from the Add-Ons before trying to send a YouTube video to it?

I installed XBMCbuntu on a laptop to a USB drive (as it didn't have a hard drive in it) - and whilst it worked, I just wasn't quite happy with it. I got myself a hard drive again, and put Windows on it.

I prefer the flexibility of Windows personally - and XBMC on Windows gives most flexibility I think.

judderod · Post by **judderod** » Fri Apr 05, 2013 10:59 am

I spent ages ripping all my blurays with makemkv recently. Hope to get XBMC up and running for movies, but will probably continue to use Logitech media centre for music. Am hoping to be able to set XBMC to run completely in the background, set to output to a dedicated HDMI port with a cable going to the other room, all controlled by an ipad over wifi.

Confused · Post by **Confused** » Fri Apr 05, 2013 11:33 am

Vtecmec wrote:The thing that irks me about XBMC is the inability to show music as album/artist, with MCE7 you point it to your music folder and 5 minutes later you have this:

With XBMC it will only seem to show a folder for each artist with the albums hidden inside, which has crappy fan art as thumbnails that takes an age to download. Is there another way?

Mr Lemon, I find the Pi a bit slow with Openelec, is that what your running? (or raspbmxc?), and which skin?

You can go to Albums, and bring up the menu off to the side, and set the Sort By to "Artist" - this will give you similar to the above - all albums by artist put together, but not separated as such - but I'm sure a request to some skinners will see this function added. In fact - I'm going to post up that screenshot now on the XBMC forum and see if someone else knows how to duplicate it!

The fanart it downloads is based on the Scraper you set in Add-Ons - this is typically higher quality than the stuff embedded into the ID3 tags in my experience.

The Pi is a slow device - it's only equivalent of about a Pentium 2 300MHz! Pretty much anything with any animations will be sluggish, and if you try to navigate the menus whilst it's playing something, you'll see stuttering.

Post by **indigolemon** » Fri Apr 05, 2013 11:49 am

Confused wrote:The Pi is a slow device - it's only equivalent of about a Pentium 2 300MHz! Pretty much anything with any animations will be sluggish, and if you try to navigate the menus whilst it's playing something, you'll see stuttering.

^^ This! I'm using xbian (http://xbian.org) and the default skin (convergence) - I did tests checking the processor usage at idle with different skins. Convergence has it sitting at ~20%, anything else pushes it higher and the stuttering starts during transitions etc. Using convergence I can play music and navigate smoothly, only skin that managed this! (note, the 20% at idle is due to the way xbmc redraws the screen, this can be improved on if you tweak backend settings - happy to post up the changes I've made if anyone is interested).

Xbian is being updated pretty frequently, and is getting better and more optimised as it goes. Which is nice

So, to conclude - for £26, minimal power draw, silent running, tiny footprint and hardware decoding built in - I really can't fault it