[mythtv-users] Xbox front-end advice please

[Ivan Kowalenko]

On Oct 3, 2008, at 15.31, kanetse at gmail.com wrote:

> On Fri, Oct 3, 2008 at 8:47 AM, Johnny Russ <jruss at mit.edu> wrote:
>>
>> Even with Xebian the xbox is barely able to handle SD stuff. I  
>> prefer using
>> XBMC.
>
> Personally, I've never tried XBMC with MythTV to compare, but my XBox
> running Xebian is easily able to handle SD content without any issues,
> except time-stretching.

I dunno, time-stretch worked out OK. I've frequently played back video  
at 1.1x or 1.2x (it's surprising how much that shortens an hour long  
episode of a show)

> If you're only playing back SD content, the XBox/Xebian approach is
> well worth considering.  Although navigating the menus can sometimes
> be a little sluggish - which I suspect is due to the 64 MB RAM on the
> XBox.

Yeah, RAM's going to be your biggest issue, and partially why XBMC is  
a much more pleasing option. XBMC runs natively inside the XBox Kernel  
(which is essentially a stripped down copy of Win2K), and has a  
significantly lower memory footprint (we're talking using at most, in  
my experience, 30-40MB of RAM, versus 56 MB, which is all Linux can  
access, plus a few hundred MB of Swap Space).

If you can get the XBMC script to work, it's worth using. XBMC is much  
more of a responsive system, requires a much less intensive setup, I  
find it to be far less fragile, and definitely performs better by  
leaps and bounds. Oh, and did I mention it doesn't take five minutes  
to load up (OK, it's a little bit of an exaggeration, but loading the  
XBox up, then loading Linux, and finally MythTV does take a long time,  
even if you automate the process).