Tag: mediacenter

XBian 1.0 beta 1.1 released, let’s give it a try

Recensions
XBian logo
New XBian Logo

About ten days ago XBian 1.0 beta 1.1 has been released. It included a significant update i was looking for, the SuperRepo integration. Just if you don’t know, SuperRepo is a community maintained repository of more 1300 add-ons for your XBian mediacenter. Why do you need it? Because the default repository that comes with xbmc follows xbmc updates and thus some add-ons take a really long time to be updated if they get broken.

This was true few months ago for the youtube add-on that makes you able to play youtube video in your tv. The add-on was broken and you had to install SuperRepo in order to get the updated version that fixed the issue.

With XBian 1.0 beta 1.1 you no longer need to install SuperRepo and your are sure that your packages are up to date with the largest repo for xbmc mediacenters. This means that if an add-on is broken as soon as it is fixed and uploaded to SuperRepo you can easily update to the new version of the add-on.

The other thing I liked the most was the auto-overclocking of the raspberry pi that boosted from 700Mhz to 800Mhz without any issue and made me play 1080p video without a breeze.

overclokcing
XBian overclocking settings

The new logo is well designed and slick, much better than the previous one. The system is, like before, a full debian with mediacenter capabilities, which is exactly what a geek wants: a fast, low cost, raspberry pi based mediacenter which does let you extend and personalize with programs that do not break the overall system.

Up and running the system consumes 11% of ram (was 17% in Xbian 1.0 alpha 5) leaving a lot of resources for the decoding of complex 1080p videos. fps jumped to an average of 46fps on 1920×1080@60Hz (were 39fps on Xbian 1.0 alpha 5). Boot time also has been shortened by 6 seconds from 56 to 50 secs.

Given the very good performances I then decided to update my production mediacenter (the one I share with all my flatmates) to the new version. Unfortunately xbian-config under the Updates submenu tells me that my system is up to date. After a little bit of googlin I’ve found the XBian forum post that describes the update procedure.

If you were looking for one of the best mediacenter distribution for your raspberry pi, you can stop looking for one since you just found it…

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