Slashdot Mirror

I've been running Raspbmc (the most popular XBMC distro for Raspberry Pi) for a long time, and it has been excellent. It's small enough to be hidden behind my TV, and with an added remote control, offers one of the best user interfaces you'll find in a 'set top box'. Streams all my 1080p movies and TV shows flawlessly (*), and handles pretty much every codec under the sun. All for ~$40 (including HDMI cable, USB PSU, SD card and MPEG-2 license for hardware acceleration).

If you search for "Raspbmc" on YouTube, you'll see my experience is the norm. If you have any specific issues, post in the Raspbmc forums and someone will most likely sort you out. :)

As for Raspbian, I'm also running this on another Pi. It's certainly not going to replace x86 servers any time soon, but it certainly has its uses. Maybe your expectations are too high for a $35, 700MHz, 512MB machine?

* Apparently, it may struggle with some very high bit rate encodes, but I've yet to see this in practice and is unlikely to be an issue for most people.

Rasberry Pi is as quiet and small as you can get, and BMC running on it is nice. http://www.raspbmc.com/

"The following components of Raspbmc are licensed under this agreement: ... Any other Raspbmc scripts, such as build scripts and helper scripts which are not sourced from an alternative source."

It is very clear what this means. Any source code of which Nazarko is the sole copyright holder is covered by this license.

It is very clear what this means. The installer in question is a binary. Any scripts that it loads may be covered by this license, but the binary is not. Further, it is clear that "source code" is not mentioned in the text which you pasted.

Again, the agreement in question does not address the issue of the license of the installer at all. Does anyone (as a coward with no name, you are not anyone, so no more from you thanks) actually know what license covers the installer? This license agreement never mentions it by name or by allusion.

IT should be noted that for components applicable to this license, any changes made MUST be made publicly available and free of charge.

There's no requirement (as with the GPL) that additional components be made available. From the complaint of the Raspbmc author, indicating confusion about his own license, which isn't GPL, and doesn't require additions to be open sourced:

This doesn't account for all source code however, such as their plugins, their method of building images or their updating scripts. Thus, XBian is not GPL compliant and does not release its entire source.

In fact, the license specifically says such things don't fall under the license (assuming they're not modified versions of the Raspbmc ones):

The following components of Raspbmc are licensed under this agreement:...Any other Raspbmc scripts, such as build scripts and helper scripts which are not sourced from an alternative source.

(emphasis added)

"The problem is that XBian doesn’t release any source code, claiming that it is all ‘available’ via Raspian’s archives and XBMC’s website."

I'm not sure XBian is wrong. All they did is take an installer from another project and use it for their own project. If they didn't functionally change the source, why can't they say "here's the code" and just point to where they got it from.

According to this site "This doesn’t account for all source code however, such as their plugins, their method of building images or their updating scripts. Thus, XBian is not GPL compliant and does not release its entire source."

If these things are separate executables or modular plugins, why can't they be closed source? Maybe I don't know all the technical details or all the nuances of the GPL, but this sounds more like a project trying to badmouth a competing project than a huge GPL issue.

There's no flash on the pi, so it won't play YouTube videos I'm afraid. I wondered if it might work in Chromium using HTML5, but it doesn't seem to for some reason and I haven't had time to investigate why.

It does work in XBMC though (see http://www.raspbmc.com/) which you can write to an SD card in the same way that you did for Debian.

http://www.raspbmc.com/