This post will be the first in a series about my long on going struggles to get my HTPC system up and running.
About 2 years a go I bought a Beagleboard XM and PandaBoard to use as replacement for my freevo based media pc. This did unfortunately never worked out as I hoped; due to dedicated media players, partly finished software support and difficulties to cross-compile Freevo; I had to continue to use my Atom+ION system.
But now (end 2012) is a new kid in town the Raspberry Pi. The very popular board as generated quite some effort to get the popular media centre software XBMC working to make the Raspberry Pi a low power but high performance media player. The guy's (m/v) of XBMC where already for longer time working to get the XBMC software working on lower powered platforms by all kinds of optimizations and this very popular Raspberry Pi with a good video (decoding) hardware has accelerated the work on this. My brother mentioned that XBMC worked quite nicely on the Raspberry Pi and that I wanted to see for my self. A Raspberry Pi is on it's way and I would like to use this waiting time to look what the PandaBoard is able to do now the software is a bit more mature.
The development of Freevo has in the past year not moved much; which makes that Freevo as HTPC platform is loosing it's attractiveness. XBMC here I come.
- I have found that for there are a couple possibilities to get xbmc up and running on the Pandaboard; most involve quite a lot of do-it-yourself; I choose to go for now with GeeXboX; this only because it advertises a more or less seamless experience on the PandaBoard.
- For the Raspberry Pi are three possibilities at the time available. To me it looked that the OpenElec distribution is the one to take because of a more active development.
Next to this introduction post will a few more posts follow (I hope at least that they will follow):
- How does PandaBoard vs Raspberry look on paper..
- Pandaboard and XBMC
- Raspberry Pi and XBMC
- How does this compare....
