XBMC Box - Raspberry Pi or Cheap Android Box

mcw92

I was thinking of purchasing and setting up a Raspberry Pi for myself for XBMC mainly.
The minimum cost would be around €50 for one, with all the basic components.

I would be connecting it to the TV and connecting a External HD to it to load the files on XBMC, with it connected it to the network to get all the Metadata.
THAT is pretty much all I will be doing, I wont be doing much streaming from add-ons on XBMC, maybe a few movies/shows a month.

But then I was thinking about an android box built for XBMC.
I've found a few different ones, ranging in different prices.

This one from Hong Kong. Delivered for €46.
Specs are RK3188T Quad Core Cortex A9, Quad Core Mali-400 GPU, 2GB Ram and 8GB storage.

This one from UK. Delivered for €44. Specs are RK3188T Dual Core A20 Cortex A7, Mali-400 GPU, 1GB Ram and 4GB storage.

Or the GBox which is considerably more expensive. But it a proven name for the Android XBMC box.

Has anyone used any of the cheaper ones from Hong Kong?

I was originally considering getting the WD TV Live with an external HD connected but I like the idea of customising XBMC.

mcw92

sugarman wrote: »

Its hard to beat a pi, they're currently less than €25 on amazon with free delivery. For €35 you can have a pi, case and mem card. Add a fiver if you need a wifi dongle.

I was looking at the pi b+ and its currently £30 on Amazon, so that's close to €38. So still around €50 or more as I said above for the newer one.

Would the android boxes be better at that price?

homewardbound11

Have a pi and a arctic box bought for 99 euro. Absolutely no comparison . Pi was too slow and lacked power. Tried the class 10 ad and USB 3 but not enough of an improvement to speed it up.

white_westie

Just an opinion from an XBMC rookie.
Was given a pi a good while ago but only fired it up a few weeks ago.
Never used or seen xbmc in action before.
Have tried both xbian and openelec versions, installed some catch up tv addons, and also used it to play recorded tv from satellite box. All worked perfecly.
For reference installed xbmc on windows7 laptop and configured the same as pi.
Again all worked perfectly, however pc much snappier than pi.
Main difference I can see is that pi will play nearly anything you want, BUT it will take much you longer to get to your file/stream to start it, but once started there is no difference.
The pi struggles when moving through menus which are generated on the fly or say reading a directory listing.

Your comment about customising xbmc could also be a negative with the pi, as the general consensice for a pi is to switch the fancy graphical things off and use the default skin, whereas on a more powerful machine, these are the things you might want to really play with.

I don't know how much better the android boxes are, but support would be very important. Building a low power box using an Intel NUC motherboard seems to be popular, but not cheap!

Just my 2cent worth
WW

homewardbound11

Over locked but it became unstable. Can't remember at the time but I went to 900 or 950 . After that it was not stable

Johnboy1951

If I were to use a Pi with an attached HDD for storage, then I would set up a small partition on the HDD for the Pi's storage of config files, album art etc etc.
That should make a huge difference to the speed of retrieving files over the SD card and even a USB stick.

I haven't found it necessary to overclock it yet, but am using it in a bedroom to play live TV over ethernet cable from a main box also running Openelec with TV tuners.
Wireless was not up to par for me .... particularly with HD TV.

The benefit of a Pi over an Android cheap solution is that the Pi can be re-used in a year or two for something other than a video client ........ there are other OSs that can be put on it .... one I set up was a music server using Squeezeplug, and has been running flawlessly for over a year.

So for me it is the variations that are possible which makes it a choice over other price comparable devices.

Others have their own needs and some do not mind at all dumping a working (hardware) device because it has been superceded and cannot be upgraded.

Openelec gets regular updates and it is a simple matter to do ..... just drop the image into a folder and on next boot Openelec will extract the files it needs and reboot into the updated OS.

Different strokes for different folks

Dravokivich

From what I've been reading through a lot of XMBC related topics over different forums, the Pi suffers due to performance issues with Python, which all the XBMC scripts seem to be based off.