XBMCbuntu

azzeretti

Is anyone running XBMCbuntu? I currently have a Ubuntu 12.04 box as a media store (in a sepreate room) and i stream to my PS3 in the sitting room. However, I am getting a pain with all the transcoding and remuxing I need to do latley and I'd like to stick a SFF in place of the PS3. My concern is that I would need a remote control as the wife and kids use it. Does anyone have any experience with MCE remote controls under XBMCbuntu? In general does XBMCbuntu run OK? I will need to run extra apps on the SFF (Sab, CouchSpud etc) so hopefully it has a small footprint.

Any any comments on XBMCbuntu in general?

PogMoThoin

I'm using XBMCbuntu, a few things.
Permanently mount your network shares in XBMCbuntu. My cheapo Ebay MCE remote mostly works fine (all basic buttons work) although I have to manually power up as I've not found a guide to getting it to work from standby or powered down (not looked for a guide tbh). XBMCbuntu performs well, miles better than XBMC layered on top of Windows. I've only an Atom chip so this makes a big difference to me.

azzeretti

PogMoThoin wrote: »

I'm using XBMCbuntu, a few things.
Permanently mount your network shares in XBMCbuntu. My cheapo Ebay MCE remote mostly works fine (all basic buttons work) although I have to manually power up as I've not found a guide to getting it to work from standby or powered down (not looked for a guide tbh). XBMCbuntu performs well, miles better than XBMC layered on top of Windows. I've only an Atom chip so this makes a big difference to me.

Thanks for the feedback.... I wouldn't mind power on/off (have you tried a WOL packet from your phone to power your box?)

PogMoThoin

azzeretti wrote: »

Thanks for the feedback.... I wouldn't mind power on/off (have you tried a WOL packet from your phone to power your box?)

No, but to be honest it's not something that bothers me, the HTPC is mostly on, we hardly watch TV at all, we mostly play media and music.

pug_

I've been using XBMCbuntu since about a week after it was released and I love it. I have a couple of boxes running it and only had a problem with one of them an ACER Rivo 3700 that wouldn't play any sound with the standard install, a bit of digging around on the fourms sorted me out pretty quickly and I haven't had a problem since.

Most remote controls should just work, I've used 3 or 4 at this stage and I've never had a problem.

In terms of what it can do it has played everything I've thrown at it so far without any issues. Resource wise I've just done a top on the Rivo (idle at the moment) and total CPU utilisation on the box is currently 8.7% and 5% Memory utilisation (2Gig total in the system). All video streams are done in hardware and I've offloaded as much as I can to a MySQL database on a separate system so I wouldn't expect it to get much more than that with general day to day use.

I have all my media mounted via nfs and the only problem I had there is to do with the fact that ubuntu is now using upstart instead of System V and I couldn't find a way to reliably get nfs to mount before xbmc started, this isn't a problem for most people but I have all my artwork on a separate system so I can share it between boxes and if it isn't ready when XBMC loads up the mount was hanging on me. In the end I had to make a bit of a hack using rc.local. Not a big problem but not ideal either.

Outside of XBMC the reason I went for XBMCbuntu instead of something like OpenELEC is because I also use the PCs for things like Skype, and web browsing etc. And for things like that it's perfectly fine if you're not looking for a fancy desktop environment out of the box.

Overall I'd recommend it we spend more time watching XBMC now than we do watching regular telly.

azzeretti

pug_ wrote: »

I've been using XBMCbuntu since about a week after it was released and I love it. I have a couple of boxes running it and only had a problem with one of them an ACER Rivo 3700 that wouldn't play any sound with the standard install, a bit of digging around on the fourms sorted me out pretty quickly and I haven't had a problem since.

@pug_: What hardware is it running without any problems on? I need to spec u p some hardware and struggling on the XMBC forums to get a definite answer on certain things!

pug_

For XBMCbuntu specifically I've got it running on an Acer Rivo 3700 and a self build PC I put together a few years ago. I don't have the exact specs for the PC any more unfortunately and I don't fancy taking it apart to find out, but it's an intel core i3 processor (2.6Ghz ish I think) and 4 Gig of DDR3 Ram. The motherboard is an Asus MicroATX of some description, but it doesn't have integrated graphics as the options available at the time weren't great so it has an oldish nvidia card with HDMI out that I got second hand instead. For what it does it's complete overkill but I had great plans for putting in tuner cards and getting rid of paid TV completely that haven't happened yet.

Honestly it really depends on what you want to do, if as you say you just want a PC that will install XBMCbuntu as well as running SAb, Sickbeard, etc. then you don't need anything all that powerful, just make sure it will decode the videos in hardware and you should be laughing.

For XBMC it's self it's not got a huge footprint for what it does, in the past I've run it on an old P4 PC, and I currently testing it out on a Raspberry Pi using OpenELEC and Raspbmc without issue (though the gui is a little unresponsive on the Pi).

Have a look through the threads here there are plenty of self builds people have done that should give you some ideas if that's what you're after.

neacy69

I thinking of converting an old dell laptop (inspiron 6000) for use with xbmcbuntu...


Any tips or pitfalls to watch out for?