Slashdot Mirror

The Upgrade is not complex if you are in a hurry. I used ATV Flash Kodi Edition. ( https://firecore.com/atvflash-... ) It cost me about $29 but its money well spent. The installation was fast and smooth. It replaces the ATV OS with OpenElec/Kodi which is a flavor of Linux built built to serve as a media platform ( https://openelec.tv/ ) . If you are the adventurous type, you can simply install OpenElec for Apple TV 1 which is free to download. I have an external USB hub that allows me to connect as many External USB drives to my system as I wish - Which Is why I went with the ATV 1 in the first place - later versions of ATV have done away with the USB port, so you have to have NAS to access your media, which is a pain.

OpenElec sends usage information back to their servers without even an option to opt out.

http://wiki.openelec.tv/index....

They say that none of the information sent back is against your privacy, but if none can be opted out, then it's a concern.

What is the SSH login?
Currently the login into OpenELEC has fixed settings.

Login: root
Password: openelec

Note that these values are case-sensitive.

How do I change the SSH password?
At the moment it's not possible to change the root password as it's held in a read-only filesystem. However, for the really security conscious advanced user, you can change the password if you build OpenELEC from source. Also you can consider logging in with ssh keys and disabling password logins.

OpenELEC_8.0.4:~ # passwd

  There is no working 'passwd'.

  The 'passwd' command changes passwords for user accounts.

  With OpenELEC it is not possible to change the system password

  SSH is included only as a last support resort. SSH is off by default.
  Most users never need SSH and need help using it so we need a default
  password. If you need to keep SSH always on then this is unsupported
  but can be secured with certificates.

  TIP: disable password authentication in ssh and use public key authentication.

But Kodi security is a bad joke anyway. Any addon has full control, so powning any repository that autoupdates these addons with virtually zero security can lead to millions of devices infected pretty quickly.

So, yeah.

What is the SSH login?
Currently the login into OpenELEC has fixed settings.

Login: root
Password: openelec

Note that these values are case-sensitive.

How do I change the SSH password?
At the moment it's not possible to change the root password as it's held in a read-only filesystem. However, for the really security conscious advanced user, you can change the password if you build OpenELEC from source. Also you can consider logging in with ssh keys and disabling password logins.

OpenELEC_8.0.4:~ # passwd

  There is no working 'passwd'.

  The 'passwd' command changes passwords for user accounts.

  With OpenELEC it is not possible to change the system password

  SSH is included only as a last support resort. SSH is off by default.
  Most users never need SSH and need help using it so we need a default
  password. If you need to keep SSH always on then this is unsupported
  but can be secured with certificates.

  TIP: disable password authentication in ssh and use public key authentication.

But Kodi security is a bad joke anyway. Any addon has full control, so powning any repository that autoupdates these addons with virtually zero security can lead to millions of devices infected pretty quickly.

So, yeah.

I've have two in use at the moment, but I must say, as much as I've been a fan from the beginning, it's a real sod of a thing to work with.

The Model C makes a great media center. I run the Raspberry Pi version of OpenELEC and with no customisation (just join the network and point it at the SMB shares) I find it works perfectly, even at 1080p and even makes use of MVK files with all the bells and whistles (multiple audio tracks, subs, etc...).

The P1 Model B that I have is for hobby projects and unfortunately I find it to be severely lacking in this regard.

I understand exactly that it is supposed to be a computer for education. However, I think it fails on the following points:

  - GPIO pins have an inconsistent naming scheme, with different numbers on the board, the schematic, and in code. Why put beginning students through such pain?

  - GPIO pins are *way* too fragile for students to experiment with. When learning it is much too easy to accidentally short the GPIO pins, which can fry the board.

  - The power issues are mind-numbing and really "unfair" for students to have to chase. Why should a student go to great lengths to get (and keep) their PI running normally. Yes, it's a good topic for advanced students, but it makes it too hard for the beginners.

  - I bought the RPI camera without the IR filter (NOIR) to do some night surveillance. I know this sounds like a simple thing, but I could not find any page offering simple instructions on which way around the ribbon cable goes ON BOTH ENDS. This kind of basic knowledge will cause students to chuck the whole fucking mess out the window.

  - There is no "power safe" way to run it. For students debugging projects this would be ideal. Some flag in the OS that eliminates all caching and makes the file system bombproof, even if it means it has to be read only. That way the student can power the system up and down all day long without any risk to the file system.

  - The SD card file system is much too fragile. I've had multiple images corrupt at random for no reason. This is a known issue with no real fix.

  - Even when exercising great care with power loading, I still find my Model B does not start reliably every time. I often have to power it on/off about 2-3 times in a row before it will boot.

  - In my experience it has been much too unreliable unless doing very simple tasks, in which case an Arduino will be much easier, have better support, be more reliable, and have better (more flexible, better timing, and more robust) GPIO capabilities.

Don't misunderstand me, I'm not hating on it. I'm just lamenting that in my opinion it has failed at its primary objective as an education platform.

---
NotAPK

True, but you can always give them a helping hand...

http://openelec.tv/

https://libreelec.tv/

https://www.reddit.com/r/kodi/...

OpenELEC FAQ disagree:
http://wiki.openelec.tv/index....

What is the SSH login?
Shortcut: #SSH Login
Currently the login into OpenELEC has fixed settings.
  Login: root
  Password: openelec

How do I change the SSH password?
Shortcut: #SSH Password change
At the moment it's not possible to change the root password as it's held in a read-only filesystem. However, for the really security conscious advanced user, you can change the password if you build OpenELEC from source. Also you can consider logging in with ssh keys and disabling password logins.

Front-end is Kodi on OpenElec running on a CuBox-i. Back-ends are several VMs. One VM is running a MythTV Back-end server recording from a roof antenna connected to a couple of HDHomeRun boxes saving to a mounted NFS QNAP 12 TB array. Other VMs run Sonarr, Sabnzbd and Sickbeard. Sorarr is also using a Transmission back-end, while Sabnzbd is using a Usenet subscription. Occasionally I also use Netflix and Vudu on a Roku stick which I turn on only when I need it. I white list every device and every port individually, and all things that could be considered borderline legal go through a permanent VPN link on my pfSense VM. Rock solid setup.

Now might be a good time to consider migrating your HTPC to Kodi, then. From what I've read so far, both OpenELEC and Kodibuntu seem like good choices -- whereas Kodibuntu is basically just an Ubuntu distro customized for Kodi, OpenELEC was built from the ground up to run Kodi on HTPC hardware like an appliance. Alternatively Kodi also runs on Windows, if you still feel that MS only beats you when you deserve it.

If you don't want a crippled DRM stick? Then accept you are gonna need an HTPC. You can get one of the Chinese ARM boxes but I find they are rather limited on the amount of software you can run on 'em, a better choice IMHO would be to get one of the AMD Socket AM1 chips which is what I've been using at the shop. Crazy low power (average around 8w-12w according to kill-a-watt), GPU powerful enough to do 1080P with no sweat or lagging, and if you don't want to spend $$$ on an OS you can slap on OpenELEC and have a 10 foot UI OOTB.

But if all you want is the cheap stick? You are gonna have to accept they are nothing but DRM delivery medium, your only real choices are the cheapo Chinese ARM nettops (which again severely limited on apps, no OS updates make them vulnerable to hack, limited playback and media options) or go with a full blown HTPC. Considering that HDMI makes everything plug and play, the AM1 makes an APU powerful enough and ULV while being cheap easy to come by, and the sheer amount of options an HTPC gives you from serving media to your entire house by slapping a multi TB drive and having your entire media library always accessible to streaming and casual gaming makes the HTPC a no brainer IMHO. I know a lot of my HTPC customers start with the sticks then quickly get tired of the limitations and want to "trade up" to something with more options.

Try one, I bet you'll find it does all you want it to do.

A better choice for an HTPC would be the AMD Athlon 5350. Its only $49, has a max TDP of only 25w, and it has enough GPU power to run Battlefield 4 so it has more than enough GPU to perform any task you'd want an HTPC to do. The AMD drivers come with a set of codecs so pretty much any video will be hardware accelerated, great for HTPCs which is why I've been using these a LOT in the shop. Cheap, low heat, great graphics, whats not to like?

Linux support for the AMD APUs has been getting pretty damned good lately (thanks to AMD opening their docs and hiring devs) so the Linux guys can pair that chip with a copy of OpenELEC and make themselves an insanely cheap HTPC, we're talking sub $150 if you hit the sales. Personally I like to use Windows 8 on 'em, as IMNSHO the only place the Metro UI works really well is as a 10 foot UI, just pair it with this remote keyboard and voila! Badass HTPC that can even do light gaming for crazy cheap.

As for TFA? Costs $540 and is less powerful than cheaper previous releases.....sounds like a pass. Of course the elephant in the room for both AMD and Intel is their chips became too powerful years ago and with the exception of a teeny tiny niche that uses every cycle on their PC the chips are just too powerful compared with the work the average user has for 'em to do. To use a /. car analogy its like selling everybody funny cars just to go to the store, then being surprised they aren't all lining up to buy the new funny cars with JATO boosters.

Hell even the gamers don't have to buy like they once did, I used to have to buy every other year, now? The PC I replaced was over 6 years old and was still playing games just fine, only reason I replaced it was the oldest needed a PC so I figured I'd use it as an excuse to pass down my Phenom II X6 and grab myself an FX8320E...fricking kicks ass BTW, paired with an R9 280 it plays everything I want in glorious 1080P....but so does my X6, since the oldest has the exact same GPU and his games are just as smooth and look just as good as mine does!

You look at what the AVERAGE, not hardcore gamer, does with their PC? They play casual games like FB games, watch videos, check email....shit that a Pentium dual laptop from 2008 has NO problems doing. Hell even the Intel shrinks for power savings really aren't that big a draw for most because at the shop I've found the average user is away from the plug for a max of 3 hours, a feat my 2011 AMD netbook has zero problems pulling off with a 4 year old battery!

This is why I have no problems staying an AMD shop despite AMD staying at 28nm, because even at 28nm they are still vastly overpowered compared to what the average user does (especially when you look at non rigged benchmarks) because once we went multicore chips went from "good enough" to so insanely powerful it isn't even funny.

Hell if I could still get the boards cheap I would probably have no problem selling Phenom I quads, just as I have no problem selling those cheap Athlon quads now for everything from office boxes to HTPCs, they are just more powerful than anything the average person does by a pretty large measure.

Plex’s lack of extensibility, scraper support, and local storage support drive me up a goddamn tree, but Plex works and XBMC doesn’t. I’m not a linux person, but I am a nerd - code is not my day job, but I’m teaching myself at night. Sweet baby Jesus, I tried XBMC so many freaking times that eventually I just gave up.

The easiest way to get XBMC^H^H^H^HKodi working is OpenELEC. It's pretty much an appliance that just works; the only part that remains slightly tricky (and not by much) is setting up a shared database if you want more than one. I have it set up on an Acer Aspire Revo in the living room and a Raspberry Pi in the bedroom; each is set up with a Playstation 3 Blu-ray remote control (about $20 each, plus a Bluetooth dongle).

I also have Plex up and running, but it's mainly for remote access. Automatic transcoding is a big win. Around home, though, there's more than enough bandwidth to just let OpenELEC grab files straight off the server.

If they "don't make it" then I'm fricking sorry but they are too damned stupid to be doing IT, full stop. I have run Win 7 HP on a 2003 Sempron with 1Gb of RAM, that is a lot older than 6 years (6 years would be 2008, which would be in C2D and Athlon X2 territory, both VERY capable CPUs) and ya know what? Ran just fine. On a 6 year old PC, which the average PC at that time were dual cores with 2Gb of RAM and 80-160Gb HDDs? Frankly Windows 7 should fly. Hell its the exact same specs as the main box I use at the shop, a 1.86Ghz C2D with 3Gb of RAM and it runs great, the only thing it didn't run OOTB was Aero but its not like a school box really needs Aero-Flip and transparent tiles does it?

As for TFA? Unless Google is willing to spend billions becoming a national ISP? Then ChromeOS is as good as fucked, and media centric Chromeboxes like TFA will be DOA. I mean did everybody forget about how the ISPs are going to "all you can squeeze" bandwidth caps? Google missed the boat, the future is ISPs giving THEIR services unlimited pipes and screwing the holy hell out of everybody else. These are obviously HTPCs but with everything in the cloud? Yeah hope you like those overage charges friend, as you try to watch HD video with most capped lines and see how quickly you blow through your pittance.

I've seen the future of the HTPC and its some company growing a brain and doing what I've been doing for over a year, just grabbing a copy of OpenELEC and slapping it in a low cost media tank like an AMD Jaguar or one of those embedded Intel Celerons or Atoms and giving folks a nice XBMC that will play pretty much any format from anywhere, be it web, DVD, flash stick, you name it it will play it. With economies of scale there is no reason why you couldn't get it down to the $200 range, maybe even less with a good deal on the chips, and still make a decent profit while selling like hotcakes. It would be the perfect replacement for the DVD player, as it would be able to play anything from anywhere and about as hassle free as using a toaster.

Somebody will pull it off and make a damned nice niche for themselves but it sure as hell won't be running Chrome. Maybe Android but even then not Google's version, more likely their own like kindle so the company can control it, although I still think the smart money would be just to pick up an already finished product like OpenELEC and slap your own brand on it, hell the thing just screams "make me an embedded media OS".

A quick Google doesn't turn anything up but I'm sure my search terms are probably not correct cause there is some cloud company called Plex Systems out there hogging all the first couple pages. However, if you want a turn key OpenELEC XBMC system see Here

I have a set-up where all my media files are stored on a generic Linux file server running Samba for CIFS/SMB and exporting NFS shares. This can be any old box you have laying around, and yes, the Raspberry Pi can do this fine.

My televisions have small boxes mounted via VESA-mount adapters on the back of them. 2 are Raspberry Pis, 1 is a Zotac Z-Box. Two are wired, one is wireless, all have power and HDMI cables. All run OpenELEC as a front end and I use Yatse on my Android phone as a remote.

The downsides are you can't integrate Netflix into OpenELEC (which is really just a skinned, slimmed XBMC) because of lack of DRM support on Linux. I haven't checked on Amazon Prime video or Hulu Plus video support lately. I know it was working before with the BlueCop repository of add-ons.

As far as i'm concerned, XBMC is pretty much the only way to go here. I keep my media files (Movies, TV, Music) on a terabyte drive in my first generation Mac Pro and samba share them gigabit to a Zotac id41 running Openelec. Openelec is an appliance-like Linux distribution that installs quickly and does nothing other than run XBMC (there's no "desktop" except XBMC; you can control it via ssh). I tried Serviio, and a couple of streaming servers, but they don't always understand what a file is supposed to do and choke on it. Samba just shares files and lets the remote machine figure them out. XBMC figures everything out that I've sent it so far; it has a host of plug-ins (what they call "add ons") including one for the BBC iPlayer, and for the ITV player, and for Hulu and you can even control rtorrent from one of them. For the Beeb and ITV I use Witopia's VPN service which can be invoked from Openelec's command line if you know what you're about. Plays 1080p nicely on my 50", all sorts of 5.1 audio goes through a semi-decent Pioneer amp. Openelec is not for dedicated Linux tinkerers. I set the Zotac up originally with Arch Linux because, you know, "I'm a geek, uh huh, uh huh" and it was a huge mistake because I was updating the damned thing every 20 minutes the way Arch people do, and I put a desktop on it and installed browsers and so forth thinking that I'd have a neat fully blown computer there in my living room and I could surf and check my email -- fahgeddaboudit! It's an HTPC only these days, plays music and video. Those Zotacs are powerful little machines though. I have a friend in town does the same thing with a Pi.

Actually as long as they are not on windows 8/8.1? Old Hairy can show you how to make "Windows Washing" as you call it trivial. It'll only take you a few minutes to clean and about an hour to do initial setup. Its so easy that for those whom I've set up this way I charge a flat $40 for any windows washing they need on the unit, its so quick and easy...ready?

1.- Install Comodo Internet Security and be sure to say YES when it comes to having it install Comodo Dragon, you'll see why in a minute. Set Comodo IS to "paranoid mode". 2.- Install Comodo Time Machine and lock the first snapshot. also in the options set it to make a snapshot daily and have it set to dump snapshots older than 30 days. 3.- Toss any links to IE, making sure its nowhere to be seen. For extra performance turn off system restore.

Now what this setup has done is make an encrypted backup with a daily snapshot (in case something manages to get through) while every process and the browser is run by default in a sandbox and treated as suspect. Using this system I've had customers that USED to get every bug, the FBI bug, the Security Tool variants, all the nasties, now? I maybe hear from them one every 6 months (when they refuse to listen to the AV and try to install something dodgy) and it takes less than 20 minutes to restore them back to health. watch how easy it is, I have even walked some over the phone when i didn't have time..1.- reboot system, 2.-When you see the big clock on the screen? Hit the home key, 3.- Pick a day before they screwed up...its THAT easy.

As for the E350? I consider it one of the great little secrets, its like the raspberry pi of X86, you can do so many different things. You can use something like the OpenELEC Fusion Build to make it into an instant HTPC/Roku/Media tank, slap a PCI to IDE? You can pop them into just about any old office box for an instant upgrade. Need a cheap file server? Media Server? Netbox? Not a problem. Hell I even play some light gaming like Torchlight II, GTA Vice City, The Portal games, there are even YouTube vids of guys playing Crysis on E350s with the bling lowered and getting playable framerates.

If you do get one? The one bit of advice i can NOT stress enough is get the fastest RAM the board will take because with an APU the RAM speed DOES matter, you can get as much as 30% more oomph out of one by pairing it with decently fast RAM. I swapped out the 2Gb of 1066 mine came with for 8Gb of 1333 and it was like upgrading the whole system, everything that was skippy went smooth and the things that were choking became usable. Also be DAMN SURE to use the latest drivers, especially in Windows and take the optional codec installs. AMD has optimized codecs that will move a lot of the heavy lifting to the GPU and with the E series it does make a difference.

Anyway I hope your medical situation works itself out and any questions feel free to shoot me an email, but I would have no problem recommending a Bobcat to a member of my family as they really are great little chips.

Well not to mention that unless ALL you care about is getting the teeniest tiniest device with X86 you can possibly get this isn't really a good value because for a few bucks more you can get an AMD Bobcat board which gives you dual cores, an HD6310 GPU capable of 1080P over HDMI and you can use up to 8GB of RAM.

I'd say if you want a dirt cheap X86 board they can't be beat, you can even use something like OpenELEC which has the drivers and XBMC baked in and have a nice media tank/HTPC for less than $200 complete. I've built several as media tanks and even replacements for aging P4s in offices and I have to say everybody just loves the things, quiet as can be, just sips power, great little systems they are.

I used OpenELEC for playing mkv, avi, and mp4. Not sure what formats you need, but you can give it a try.

Windows 7 is good until 2020 and by that time we'll have plenty of choices ready to take its place like Open ELEC so its probably not something you should be too awful worried about. Heck most of my boards came with Win2K drivers as late as last year and I have no doubt we'll see Windows 7 drivers for boards probably for at least a couple of years after the plug is pulled which will mean up until 2022 so if you can't find a suitable replacement in 9 years you gotta be doing something wrong friend.

Oh and FYI but for those that use WMC and have large movie collections let me introduce you to your new best friend Media Center Master which i not only hand out with each new HTPC but also use myself and it fricking ROCKS with a capital R. You want all your movies to show up with artwork, synopsis, cast and crew, and all without requiring more work than "clicky clicky" on your part? MCM has you covered. Want it in a format that can be read by WMC,XBMC,or any of a half a dozen devices? Just check the box and MCM will have that covered as well. I have dropped a customer's 400+ title movie collection on a drive and had MCM set up the whole thing, folder structure, artwork, you name it in less than half an hour and the most i had to do with it was answer the occasional question like "there are 4 movies with this title, which one is the one you have?". For anybody that wants to keep a large collection of movies and/or TV shows organized and at their fingertips you just can't go wrong with MCM, highly recommend.

This is why I have been pointing my customers to stand alone boxes like Nbox and WD devices, its too damned easy for these "streaming" boxes to get the plug pulled and then you are left with a brick. Logitech Google TV anyone?

This is also why I prefer low power X86 units like the AMD mini-Bobcat boards, if somebody pulls support? Well screw you too, I can slap something like Open ELEC on there and turn pretty much ANY X86 unit into an XBMC "media in a box" with 10 foot UI, just look at how MSFT fucked their customers with Internet TV, but with X86 you can either use a third party hack or completely toss the OS, you DO always have options. With these little ARM suckers I have found too damned many that end up being "DRM in a box" that when the company abandons them if you are VERY lucky you might find one guy in his basement putting out a build that if you jump through enough hoops MIGHT work for a while, but as soon as Chuck gets another box that support is gone and you are again left with a useless hunk of plastic.

So call me crazy, call me unhip, but i will continue to stick with either a stand alone that will continue working if the company goes tits up or if they have to have streaming support go with an X86 based device so that at least i can put on another OS or update it myself if the company decides to no longer support the users.

Can't say anything bad about Gigabyte, they and Asrock are my two "go to" brands. Biostar is fine for basic office boxes but you learn that they ONLY support the chips that were released before the boards were and their CPU support lists are the biggest lies on the planet, but Asrock and Gigabyte have been damned good about putting out firmware updates for newer chips.

And Drinkypoo? Seriously dude FUCK THE IGPs, I mean who gives a shit about IGPs anymore? Sure if you are buying an FM1 or FM2 where its an APU but honestly those are only good for office boxes and media tanks. If it were ME and I didn't like AMD IGPs? You can grab a basic nvidia card for less than $20, hell they often have cards in the $10 range that will curbstomp the IGPs anyway so sticking with an IGP is really pointless. So if you spot a nice Athlon or Phenom kit you can just slap in a cheap card and there ya go, all set.

Finally for a media tank which lets face it is all the Pi and Wii can do anyway? bobcat. They sell Bobcat boards for $70 shipped on amazon or Tiger sells a kit for $120 that gives you everything but the DVD and HDD, even comes with a slick little VCR style case and those Bobcats are nice and quiet while having about the same power as the first gen Core2Duo. You can then use the OpenELEC Fusion build which already has the drivers and XBMC baked in and voila! Cheap as hell HTPC that is useful for other tasks like a media server or web surfer. I've used quite a few bobcats and they are nice chips, I was impressed enough I sold my full size laptop and just use an Asus EEE with an E350, does anything I need it to do with great battery life. They are cheap, they are low heat, hell you can even get fanless if you want insanely quiet, and they have enough power they can run the latest browsers and Libreoffice no problemo. I'm probably gonna be ripping the board out of the system I use at the shop for one, that is how much I like 'em, I'll be able to turn that P4 era Sempron into a dual core with 4GB of RAM for like $100...what's not to like?

Yep and sadly they used the power VR stuff on a lot of the Atom units, which with its low power and low price would have been a great makers platform. But luckily we DO have AMD and Bobcat, you can buy a Bobcat board with 1.6GHz dual core and a GPU that will do 1080P over HDMI for just $70 and there are several custom builds for that chip that lets you make cool things like HTPCs out of it, I personally like OpenELEC which uses the XBMC frontend and has pretty decent support for remotes.

That is why I don't understand how any FOSS advocate can say intel is more FOSS friendly than AMD, they didn't even bother making sure they could get the code for PowervVR opened before buying, whereas once AMD bought ATI they were looking at opening the code almost out of the gate and have been spending their money opening the drivers, getting the specs into the hands of FOSS devs, even paying to help support not only the guys making Radeon drivers but Coreboot as well.

I have been selling and using AMD exclusively for the past 5 years at the shop and the bang for the buck is just nuts, for the same price that I would have paid for a Pentium dual I got an AMD hexacore that just blows through everything I throw at it with cycles left over. Seriously what's not to like?

I've been saying this for quite awhile, if the FOSS community would put their money where their mouth is more companies would be willing to support FOSS. And this isn't just some minor offering, not only has AMD been opening the GPUs as fast as they can but they are moving to Coreboot so for the first time you'll be able to have a fully open system from the BIOS on up.

And when you consider that you can get a 6 core AMD kit for just $260 frankly its not a hard choice. Even though I primarily use Windows I think open hardware is important and competition is vital so I've put my money where my mouth is and have been selling nothing but AMD in my shop for the past 5 years and the customers couldn't be happier. I also put my money where my mouth is with regards to my family, we have 5 desktops and 2 laptops, ALL AMD.

So if you support open hardware then frankly the choice is clear, buy or build AMD for your next system. They have plenty of great desktop chips and if you need a laptop I have gotten several Liano quads for customers and they just love the performance, and if you'd like a really cheap HTPC just pair a Bobcat board with OpenELEC which is a really nice XBMC based Linux with the Fusion drivers baked in. Pair it with one of the Bobcat "VCR style" barebones kits and for less than $200 you can have a damned nice HTPC that sucks less than 18w under load and does full 1080P. Truly a kick ass little system and you can't beat the price.

I've also had pretty good luck with the Lenovo HTPC remote and its combo of trackball and mini-keyboard makes it quite easy to do a lot of the stuff that would normally require you putting down your remote and reaching for a keyboard, renaming files or whipping off a quick chat for instance.

For those that want an XBMC HTPC without all the hassle I'd suggest OpenELEC as they have it pre-built for most of the popular HTPC hardware, Atom+ION, AMD Fusion, Intel GMA, even Apple TV and Raspberry Pi. They are at RC2 with this latest XBMC so I figure another few days and it'll be the main release and it is pretty much install and go.

So if all you want is an HTPC there ya go, its lightweight, built just for running XBMC, and has all the drivers for the hardware you are gonna be using, couldn't be simpler.

I'm wanting one for XBMC. Specifically http://openelec.tv/, which has a RaspPi build.

Once someone gets one in stock, I'll order one. Three more if they work as advertised. It looks perfect, combined with one of these.

If you like the XBMC UI and want to build an HTPC dirt cheap you really should check out OpenELEC as its built around the XBMC UI and has pre-builds for all the major designs, Atom/ION, AMD Fusion, standard Intel or AMD, etc and even comes with PVR software baked in.

That said I looked into smart TVs before going HTPC with my family and the problem is it is proprietary city, everybody is making their own UIs and nothing is standardized and they all frankly suck. its more about trying to lock you into their ecosystem than it is making a truly great UI and it shows, slow loads, clunky UIs, problems with compatibility with this code or that website, its just a giant PITA.

I built an AMD Bobcat based HTPC for mom and an Athlon X2 based for dad (because he wanted to be able to access his shop cams and so needed a little beefier CPU) and its like night and day compared to the smart TVs. They can run all their programs (I went win 7 HP with XBMC but Win 8 actually works good in this regard as metro is practically a 10 foot UI already), everything is snappy, I slapped in a 1TB HDD and ripped all their CDs and DVDs so if mom wants to watch her horror movies or dad his action its just a push of the button, they can chat, surf, its just so much nicer than the clunky slow smart TVs it wasn't really any comparison.

My only advice would be if you want small and low power get the Bobcat, I ended up having to use a nice black mini-tower instead of a VCR style on dad to fit a silent heatsink, unlike the Bobcat the Athlons do generate some heat and all the mini CPU coolers i found either ran hot or sounded like an F15 taking off. That said I have paired a cheap Athlon or Phenom II X4 with an HD4850 ($30-$40 at Geeks) for several customers that wanted to game and they are quite happy, playing Batman:AC and Saints Row 3 and thanks to all the Steam sales its a lot cheaper than the consoles to build a collection and of course no discs to mess with or lose either.

This is why guys like me that build HTPCs aren't worried about "smart TVs"...because they suck. They aren't updated very often (if at all) and use seriously weak chips anyway so what you end up with is a really poor experience.

My advice would be to look at a DIY kit for an HTPC. If you want high def and low power you should look at an AMD Bobcat, if you don't care about HD you can get an Intel Atom (yes I know about ION but they aren't common or easy to come by anymore and its dead end tech since Nvidia left the chipset biz) and if you want to game or be able to transcode an Athlon or even a Phenom X6 if you can find it on sale would be good.

The nice thing about an HTPC is that you can have the latest browser, flash is no problem, it'll easily take wireless remotes (The Lenovo mini-keyboard with trackball is the one I recommend if you want a small and light remote, easily fits in one hand), Steam had big picture mode which is great for an HTPC, hell its one of the few places Windows 8 makes sense as that fugly metro makes a great 10 foot UI as the tiles are easy to hit. For those that don't want to spend the whole $40 for Win 8 there is OpenELEC which is free, has the XBMC front end, even comes with PVR software baked in and is pre-compiled for various chips so you simply pick the one you've got and away you go.

Once you try an HTPC you'll see how truly limited these "Smart TVs" are and will not want to go back. With the HTPC you can do everything a normal PC can, plus use it as a media tank, with all your movies and music loaded and ready to go, it can play games like a console, and you don't have to use some limited browser that most likely won't be getting updates and is slow to begin with. With OpenELEC you can build one for less than $150, Win 8 less than $200, and frankly the things will just last and last. The whole "Smart TV" is a nice novelty but use it any length of time and as you pointed out the limitations start showing pretty quickly, same with using the consoles to surf.

Congrats, you chose...wisely. The ONE place where Win 8 is actually better than Win 7 IMHO is on HTPCs, the metro UI gives you nice big targets to hit and makes the perfect 10 foot UI. That is why i say "its all about choosing the right tool for the job" because even Win 8 has a place its good and that is HTPC.

If you hadn't already gone with Win 8 I would have actually recommended a version of Linux, specifically OpenELEC as they have pre-built versions for the various chips including Atom, is really light on resources, and has XBMC for its 10 foot UI. So if you get tired of Win 8 or just want to try something new give it a shot, it even works well with more wireless remotes.

As for running a VM? Frankly nothing beats the pirate versions of Windows called "Tiny windows" as they have stripped ALL the bullshit to make Windows as light as possible while still running a good 95%+ of the software. it was originally cooked up by gamers who wanted an ultra stripped down windows so they'd have more resources for their games but it also kicks ass in VMs. Their version of XP only uses 67Mb of RAM fully patched, their version of 2K3 86Mb, Win 7 around 130Mb, and they even managed to get Vista down to 385Mb of RAM. Hey they are tweakers not miracle workers. But all you have to do is swap their cracked key with your own and voila! A legal copy of Windows that has already been pre-tweaked for VM usage. Frankly MSFT really ought to hire the guy that makes 'em, I put TinyXP against embedded XP and winFLP and it curbstomped both when it came to resource usage, which is why the Tiny versions make great VMs.

Look up the E350 barebones friend, don't know if its the same there but here those sell for around $130 USD with a nice HTPC style case and PSU. I've built a couple of them for use as HTPCs and office boxes and the owners are quite happy, you are talking a max of less than 20w under load, full 1080P over HDMI, hell they even have a PCIe slot in case you want to upgrade the graphics later. Its pretty nice as an HTPC but just remember to get the fastest RAM the board supports as it has shared memory so the RAM speed counts. i changed the 2Gb of 1066 for 2 4Gb sticks of 1333 in my EEE and I could tell a pretty big difference, games that would be laggy before play nice now.

But one thing we seem to agree on is the price, it just makes NO sense! Why would anyone pay the same price as a netbook for something that isn't as good? When they first announced Chrome OS I thought it would be a game changer, I thought they'd sell them in the $100-$150 range and just take over the low end market, but the price is simply too high, you'd be better off with a netbook or a Kindle as with both of those they are at least useful offline.

Anyway good luck on your HTPC, I can say they are pretty sweet for the task and if you don't want to pay for Windows OpenELEC has a build just for the AMD Fusion chips, its got the XBMC UI and is actually pretty nice.

Uhhh...why would it affect your HTPC? Simply use the net and get all the shows you want WHEN you want and with less commercials to boot. I have built several HTPCs for customers and between Win 7 MC Internet TV, Hulu Basic, and YouTube they have so many shows to choose from they could watch TV from sun up to sun down and never watch all the great shows out there. And that of course isn't counting using BT to get shows, this is just the legal means.

As a nice bonus you can get an E350 barebone which since you won't have to be encoding like a DVR will work great and only costs $130 for the barebone with nice case and PSU and for those that don't want to spend the money on Win 7 HP you can just download OpenELEC which has the XBMC 10 foot UI and has a prebuilt build for AMD Fusion chips like the E350, couldn't be simpler.

So I see no reason why this should affect your HTPC, its just one more reason to just buy bare cable for the net and say screw their TV offerings. I personally haven't bothered plugging in the free converter they handed me or my capture card because with Internet TV and all the shows on the net frankly there is more TV than I have hours in the day. Lately I've been on a classic kick so I'm watching Kolchak and Night Gallery here at the shop while I work. Its nice, less commercials than I deal with on cable, and couldn't be easier to do.

Thank you. I'm sure you got that from some about page and this IS the Internet, where they have these things called "hyperlinks". So would it REALLY have killed someone to put the parties names in hyperlinks that led to at least one fricking about page?

That said...WHAT THE FUCK PEOPLE????? What? Why? Who in the hell thought it was a good idea to turn the fricking Pi, a device designed to be cheap above all, into a fricking MEDIA CENTER? Now robotics, UAVs, remote control systems of all sorts? yeah I can see that. But looking at these things you pretty much have to massage the fuck out of your media to make it run on the thing and even then its hit or miss...why? Why would you do that?

You want an actual FUNCTIONAL media center? here you go...E350 in a nice HTPC case and there is even a free Linux HTPC build for it, couldn't be simpler. And unlike the Pi you won't spend weeks massaging the hell out of your formats, it'll play pretty much any format out of the box and only uses 18w under load and idles around 6w.

So no wonder I didn't know what this was, the thought of even attempting something so frankly pointless was simply beyond me. To use a /. car analogy this is like buying a car known for its hyper fuel efficiency and then using it to pull a boat. Sure you might get it to work for awhile but you are gonna spend more time working on the damned thing or dealing with problems than it is worth. media decoding and scaling is NOT a light task and a wimpy CPU like the Pi wasn't made for that task, not even close. Hell does it even have the broadcom decoder chip? Even if it does it'll be limited as hell for that role, it just makes no sense.

Yeah they are cheap...but also limited as hell for that function. You have to have the media in the right codec, not have it at too high a bitrate, basically you pretty much have to tailor your media to the device.

A MUCH better device for a cheap HTPC is the E350 kits. You can get the board alone at Amazon for around $70, that gives you a dual core and a Radeon GPU that'll accelerate a heck of a lot of formats, but I prefer the ones with the nice case and PSU for $125. Slap on a copy of Win 7 Home or if you want a free OS then OpenELEC has a Fusion build ready to go. You can use videos in dozen of formats, it multitasks well, its just a better system for an HTPC.

That said there are still a ton of places that the pi makes an excellent device, rocketry, robotics, UAVs, there are a ton of different jobs that this will fit and the fact they keep adding cool features like this is just icing on the cake.

Well please keep it up, I know I'd much rather have differing viewpoints instead of mindless groupthink and insults.

As for TFA its total FUD, AMD has already released the specs for Brazos and Hondo is just Brazos 2, they aren't supporting Android because no OEM has asked to use this chip in an Android device so wasting time making drivers that nobody is asking for is just stupid. You'll be able to use any bog standard Linux on this, be it Ubuntu or Debian or whatever, since AMD opened their specs on Brazos ages ago.

Oh and just a little FYI but if anybody wants to use one of those cheap Brazos boards for a killer HTPC? Then you're in luck as OpenELEC has a free Linux build with XBMC already tailored for Brazos Fusion chips. I'm sure it'd run just fine on Hondo as well but with E350s going with really nice HTPC cases for $125 on NewEgg and Amazon I'd stick with it until Hondo has been out awhile. If anyone wants to know how it runs? Not bad actually, nice UI, supports most remotes, sold a couple of them and the customers love the hell out of 'em.

It doesn't even come with a remote, you have to supply one yourself!

This is a feature, not a bug. I have too damn many remotes as is. I've taken to using my Android phone as a remote for my XBMC boxes and a couple of TVs.

The only feature I see missing on this is playing local networked media. DLNA compatibility would do it.

Well if you want a cheap one check out the Fusion builds, especially the E350s, as you can often find them in a nice HTPC kit for like $100. And if you want to use XBMC then check out Open ELEC which has builds for the AMD Fusions that covers the E series as well as the newer A series chips. It is only 120Mb and has everything already to go, just install. I've built a couple of HTPCs using the E350s and although my customers went Win 7 HP I can tell you those chips do make for nice media centers, full 1080P and whisper quiet and only draw around 18w under load. again don't know how well it'll work under Linux as i only played with OpenELEC for a little while before installing Windows but it seemed damned nice.

If you REALLY care about bang for the buck in the low power space your best best would probably be an AMD E350 kit which is just $120 USD with a nice little case. I've built a few HTPCs and office boxes out of these and they are not bad little units, if you are really concerned about price you can use Open ELEC which makes a Fusion version of their distro with the XBMC UI for a nice dirt cheap HTPC and for offices there are several distros that support fusion OOTB although my customers prefer Win 7 which runs quite well on these.

So if you are REALLY worried about price and want the best bang for the buck that would be the way to go IMHO, to get the same performance with Atom you'd need an ION setup and those are often a good $60 higher on average from my last price checks.

So if you wanted something similar to TFA you are looking at around $720 to get 6 E350 dual core kits, cheaper of course if you simply buy the boards. Of course you'd have to figure in memory and some sort of storage but since everyone has their own opinions on those I figured it wouldn't be worth attempting to figure.

UEFI GPT is actually pretty simple, its a lot like the old boot sector only with a backup sector and support for large disks. But with virtual box you don't have to worry about partitioning, its treated as a file, no different than say a BD Rip. I wouldn't want to try multibooting it anyway since 1.-Its only a time limited copy and if its like Win 7 you'd have to reinstall when the time runs out, even if you buy it and 2.-Frankly after trying you won't want to buy it anyway!

But the way GPTworks is you have your wrapper for the old boot sector, that lets XP and other non UEFI aware OSes boot, then you have the GPT which is an extended partition table, then you have the error correcting code along with a pointer to the backup in case the original boot sector gets hosed for any reason. Remember how in the old days if track 0 failed you were boned? Not anymore, it'll just work off the backup.

For a nice free tool that works with UEFI and GPT I'd recommend Paragon Partition Manager Free as that's what I use. It supports pretty much any kind of drive, lets you resize existing partitions, its a good tool. I also use their Backup And Recovery Free which I have to say has saved my ass in the past. I was working with a partition when we had a brownout and the system lost power, the partition was fucked but I was able to boot off their recovery CD and restore the OS from backup on a separate drive, it couldn't have been easier to do.

But anyway just use VBox and give it a spin, It'll just treat it as a file so no need to screw with your partitions. Once you get tired of playing with it you just have VBox toss the partition and you can then uninstall VBox no problems. Personally I keep VBox around though as its great for checking out new OSes, I have been using it to play with OpenELEC which looks like it might make a good OS for a cheap HTPC. later bro and sorry about the tune, but who don't love Joel and the bots?

Why would THAT be attractive? You can already do that for less than $300 with X86 and have it any way you want, $340 for a complete system just add the OS of your choice. These units take less than 18w under full load, no noise, and you can run any software you want. Just use the VESA mount on the back of any monitor and voila! No muss no fuss.

BTW these also make excellent HTPCs with either Windows or if you don't want to spend the money there is OpenELEC which has a build just for these units and has XBMC with the 10 foot UI built in, a really cheap and easy way to have a truly kick ass HTPC.

So I could see the appeal in mobile but on the desktop? Not really seeing a point. I have changed out a few office buildings with units like these and the nice thing is unlike an ARM unit they can run the software required to do their business. When it comes to the desktop there are just too many X86 only programs people depend on so unless someone comes out with hardware accelerated X86 emulation (which you probably couldn't do without getting sued by intel) then I just don't see it gaining any real ground.

http://openelec.tv/news/item/235-openelec-on-raspberry-pi-our-first-arm-device-supported

Of course getting hold of a RaspBerry Pi will be tough, but once you have done that it's all done :)

@ GP: Check out OpenELEC, xmbc 'appliance' distro. small and to the point