Raspbmc versus OpenELEC

Since I bought a Raspberry PI from http://12geeks.com/ in Singapore, I was impressed when Michael Cheng showed me at http://hackerspace.sg/ you can play back videos with it.

Yes! A way to easily watch my downloads on a big screen, which was basically impossible to do on an Apple TV.

First I tried Raspbmc when Michael was using. IIUC it's a port of XMBC 12.2 "Frodo" to the PI. I quickly found a few issues:

Later I found http://openelec.tv/ prompted by a tweet.

Open Embedded Linux Entertainment Center (OpenELEC) at least has a decent github powered issue tracker. Nonetheless both raspbmc and OpenELEC rely on XBMC. Nonetheless OpenELEC's support / IRC channel seems much healthier than the Raspbmc project.

Anyway, both projects stem from XBMC which has a ton of usability issues, however I really like their potential. I wish Chromecast was better supported, but after looking at it briefly, you get the same functionality by just pointing XBMC to the content as suggested in this JSONRPC post.

I can't help but think though, if it was easier to connect my laptop or desktop to my big screen TV, it would probably be a better solution overall. Basically I like to flick through my photo collection at lightning speed. You need SSD, fast CPU, a suckless image viewer and the latest codec support like that for WebP. Nonethless I still think the PI presents a pretty good low cost dedicated media solution. It's better than the Apple TV, if you can live without Airplay Mirroring (which is so damn nice tbh).

Found any of my content interesting or useful?