Back Story
I have wanted one of these boards to replace my Apple TV2 running XBMC for a long while now but as everybody knows the first version sold out almost immediately and the average price for one on the after-market is sometimes 3-4 times what the Element14 sells it for. They announced the second version and I decided to try get my hand on one before it hit the after-market. Long story short, after about a month of waiting on order fulfillment, I have it.
What to do?
At my office a couple of the guys have these configured as HTPCs (XBMC of course). I couple have positive feedback while others are so-so. The number one complaint I have heard it the speed. and digging further, I find a couple of them attribute it to slow SD cards. So I was worried that I might have to purchase another SD even though I already have one laying around. Of course I decided to try what I have on hand first, and I am happy with the results so far.
Here is what I have:
Hardware
Software
Configuration
- Installed with python script (install.py) from the site with a downloaded image
- Install NTP
- sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata for America/Montreal
- Inside XBMC (Settings > Appearance > International) set location to Canada/Montreal
- I use NFS shares, so I add those with the appropriate scrapers and allow it to scan the library
Conclusion
This is not my final setup but I think this gets me back to where I was before and I am okay with that. The main thing I wanted to test here is the performance of the SD card with RaspBMC and that seem to be working out. I don’t know if Class 4 would be too slow or if the doubling of the RAM from the previous model is making all the difference here (512MB vs 256MB). I don’t have a class 4 to test the difference, so all I know is this setup works…..for now 😀
Villo's Headspace 