Got my Pi this weekend and started to play with. As other's have noted, the installation of xbmc is pretty straightforward. I chose Raspbmc, downloaded the installer, formatted a SD card I had lying around and then plugged the Pi into my network. I also plugged in a Logitech wireless keyboard I had lying around.

After about 30 minutes of downloading and configuring, it all came up. I had it displaying on my 1080P projector.  Mapped a drive on my network that has my movies and started to play them.

A couple of initial observations.


- it's running fine off the USB port on a PC.

- I can't get the time/date to change to NZ time. It seems to be GMT and I can't a menu item to change that

- the menus are a bit sluggish and when I select a movie to play, it pauses a while (100Mbs ethernet) before it starts to play. I guess it's buffering but on my Popcorn Hour on the same network, it starts to play immediately. I am grabbing content via SMB.

- Tried to play some content with Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD Master and it didn't seem to like that. Since it can pass through Dolby Digital and DTS over HDMI I would have thought it should be able to pass the HD Audio through also. I  need to perform further checks.

I really haven't used XBMC before so part of the time is for to learn the interface.

But all in all very impressive for what it costs.  I plan to make a case using a cassette tape box  (decided to eschew the $15 box Element14 sells since it back ordered anyway and I have tons of cassette boxes lying around). Have a couple of friends who are interested also.


If I can get it to work with an IR Remote (might try to see if I can find a MCE remote somewhere) and then learn that with a Harmony, then this looks like a great media player option.