Is Pi + XBMC better?

WD Legacy Products WD TV Live Streaming
1

In your honest opinion, do you think a Rasberry Pi + XBMC is a better media player option than the WDTV Streaming?

What does the Streaming do better than a Pi + XBMC?

For the record, I’m a loyal WDTV user, who’s owned 3 of the WDTV devices; just thinking of getting another device to stream networked videos, and I’ve tried XBMC on my tablet, and was very pleased with the experience.

2

I have 2 SmartTVs, one LG and one Samsung both with media player capabilities and a 4 year old HD capable laptop running XBMC. I like XMBC a lot, its configurable and easy to use with a WMC remote control but for me the WDTV series wins out on picture quality. I have watched the same videos over all devices for comparison purposes and the WDTV does have the best playback for HD recordings. Unfortunatley it does come second with regard to text subtitle playback, XBMC text rendering for subtitles is much better and more flexible.

BGB

3

No, it’s not better cause even if overclocked the Raspi (on OpenElec) does not playback 1080p and DTS-MA without stutter.

4

XBMC can be done so it’s better

the problem though with XBMC, to really do it better

so it’s a smooth experiece, with few issues

you need to invest 300-400+ minimum to build an htpc

then you have the SMP for $80 which does pretty much everything

a cheap no issues XBMC box still doesn’t exist today

but if you want to spend the $$$ you can have a great XBMC box

that will probably surpass any other box out there

5

While not disagreeing  with any of the above. It does depend on your needs.

I had a Raspberry Pi anyway, and it is under £30 to buy anyway. If you like playing around with such things, will give hours of playing with anyway.

I am running Raspbmc on it with the Amber theme. It works great, and gradually migrating all my media across to it.

The vast majority of my video’s are 1080 x720 at best, so if t cannot cope with higher HD, that does not worry me.

XBMC  does take some learning, sometimes frustrating, but fun also.

Additionally there are loads of add-on’s, so if you’re are in the UK can do i-player, and other streaming services etc.

I didn’t need to buy anything else, thought I might need a keyboard etc, but use the yatsi remote app.

It plugged into the network via  mains homeplug gadget, with a 2T hard disk in the usb socket. So did not need to buy anything else.

All for under £30