Oddly enough, I faced a similar situation to you (hell, I even live in NZ). I tried out xbmc, and what drove me back to freevo was that is was just plain old simpler to configure, run and administer and the interface is cleaner. XBMCs interface is just too busy for me.
My freevo box eventually failed, and I got me an acryan mini media player. It plays anything I have thrown at it - bar 1 movie - but man does the interface suck. I got it because the page was all open source this and customisable that, but its bollocks. Its impossible to do anything to the interface at all, and its code is poorly written - it says it supports online mp3 streams, but really it only works with shoutcast - with the connection string hard coded into the binary so when shoutcast changes something, no matter how trivial, its falls over and you have to wait for acryan to fix it. All the interesting stuff, like code that plays video and audio and receives events from the remote, is contained in this massive closed source binary which starts up a copy for each little thing, and it comes from realtec. So its a bit of a have really. There is a project that replaces all the UI stuff with "MMS" - my media system, but I can't get it to go. I wish I had freevo back :( On 24/02/11 10:48, Bill Burroughs wrote: > Hi all, > > I had been using Freevo for almost 4 years until about 4 months ago - I got a > 720p TV, and as my Freevo box wasn't powerful enough to decode 720p, I bought > myself a cheap little (Argosy) media box. Needless to say, losing the > ability > to customise things has got more and more annoying over the last 4 months, > and > I'm now so frustrated with it, and so underwhelmed by 720p, that I'm giving > up > on it. My freevo box is still in only a few pieces (4 months is a long time > to > go without opening up an unused piece of hardware), so won't take me long to > throw it back together, and I was thinking of just wiping the HD, and > installing OS and freevo from scratch. > > Obviously, as I'm doing that, I have the opportunity to choose a different OS > and different media player, and I've been looking at XBMC and Boxee. From > what > I've seen XBMC is the better choice from a OSS perspective, and seems to be > very customisable. The question is, why choose Freevo over XBMC? I know > under > normal circumstances a question like this to an OSS mailing list will end up > in > an endless stream of flames, and in those situations I would normally > sirupticiously defect without anyone knowing or caring. However, I've found > the Freevo lists to be very friendly and fair over the years, so I thought I > would throw it out to an open conversation to see what happened. > > > From a usage perspective, I don't record TV at all, New Zealand TV is > > pretty > rubbish (unless you like 24/7 rugby and "Australia's next top singing > sheepdog" > shows), and forces me to have to download UK and USA TV programmes from the > usual sources. Thus, all my content comes from SMB shares, with the odd net > radio station. One very handy feature I've seen for XBMC is a "latest > download > episodes" script/plugin, which would save a great number of arguments between > my better half and I. > > Anyway, let me know what you all think, but be gentle... :) > > Cheers > DJM23 > > P.S. In case it matters, I would describe my python skills as George W Bush > Jnr, i.e. clueless, but my linux, windows and perl/php skills are pretty > good; > and it hasn't stopped me from being able to hack freevo to do whatever I want. > > Nothing is true; Everything is permissible... > > > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Free Software Download: Index, Search& Analyze Logs and other IT data in > Real-Time with Splunk. Collect, index and harness all the fast moving IT data > generated by your applications, servers and devices whether physical, virtual > or in the cloud. Deliver compliance at lower cost and gain new business > insights. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-dev2dev > _______________________________________________ > Freevo-users mailing list > Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Free Software Download: Index, Search & Analyze Logs and other IT data in Real-Time with Splunk. Collect, index and harness all the fast moving IT data generated by your applications, servers and devices whether physical, virtual or in the cloud. Deliver compliance at lower cost and gain new business insights. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Freevo-users mailing list Freevo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
