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OpenELEC for Raspberry Pi

The guys at OpenELEC, an embedded OS built specifically to run XBMC, have announced their first ARM port and with it, support for Raspberry Pi. (Please note that although their website says that they can only support the Model B, the post was written just before we announced the upgrade doubling the Model A’s RAM.) I’m a week or so late to the party on this – apologies to Gimli and Stephan for the delay in posting this while we wrestled with launch stuff here.

When a download is available (which should be pretty soon, and I should point out that we have been the limiting factor here; we need to get one of the boards with a replaced magjack out to the guys so they can test it on a production board – that’s Gimli’s alpha board you can see in the video), we’ll be hosting it on our downloads page.

A quick word from Stephan:

What is OpenELEC?
OpenELEC is an embedded operating system built specifically to run XBMC, the open source entertainment media hub. The idea behind OpenELEC is to allow people to use their Home Theatre PC (HTPC) like any other device you might have attached to your TV, like a DVD player or Sky box. Instead of having to manage a full operating system, configure it and install the packages required to turn it into a hybrid media center, OpenELEC is designed to be simple to install, manage and use, making it more like running a set-top box than a full-blown computer.

OpenELEC is tiny, at 85-115MB, and for RaspberryPi it comes in at only 70MB, which comprises the whole OS including XBMC, Python, and all services/tools needed to run XBMC. This means that at the moment, it’s the smallest distro for Raspberry Pi that we’ve seen.

118 comments

Yay! More goodies !
An a use for the old, less than 1GB SD cards :-)
Thanks a lot !

Gives Apple TV a run for it’s money… Awesome

Actually, the R-Pi has made me realize that the Apple TV is a pretty damn good deal.

Hardware wise, it’s got to have about the same power as the cheapest Pi, so lets say $25 for the basics. But then it has a PSU built in, WiFi built in, storage for the OS, developers for the OS, a case etc. That’s going to push the cost to manufacture into the $50 range. Now I know that means they are still making at least 40% margin, but considering Apple are supposed to be really expensive, the Apple TV doesn’t seem to be in that category.

I’m slightly biased though, I love my Apple TV! Looking forwards to seeing what XMBC can do for me though…….

well based on the price I paid for the Pi after shipping, plus there’s no case. Sometimes I wonder if Apple TV was a better option. just IMO

I know what you mean. I still think the Raspi is stellar value, but my point was, the Apple TV is pretty damn good value as well.

As a owner of AppleTV & future owner of RPi, pros & cons of AppleTV compared to a RPi used as a media center:

Pros:
– nice case, fits well under a TV
– built in PSU
– optical audio out
– nice remote
– built-in bluetooth for keyboard support (latest firmware or jailbreak)
– built-in 802.11 a,b,g,n 2.4+5Ghz
– Screen mirroring from iPad/iPhone and Mac (in 10.8)
– Integration with iPhoto/Aperture on macs for displaying photos (main reason why i got it, no other comparable alternatives exist)
– Plug & enter your apple login & Play.

Cons:
– Without Jailbreak, you can only watch Youtube, Vimeo, things you have to pay for and stuff that’s imported in iTunes – needs jailbreak for playing from a network share or stream.
– Even if you Jailbreak, installing XBMC & other mods is hard for non-techies unless you pay $30 more for aTVflash
– No USB ports, you cannot connect a USB hdd or stick. Thus no torrent client to silently download some linux distrubution episodes during the day so you can view them in the evening when you get home.
– No HDMI CEC support (using TV’s remote to control playback, possible with RPi)
– No Analog audio out. You can use either TV’s crappy speakers or you need a full receiver with optical in.
– Not able to play HD MPEG4 (h.263) files (RPi can do this)
– NO VGA !!! :-)
– Very hard to run other apps and the few extra that exist (Couch Surfer web browser) are not fun to use with the remote.
– Boring monochrome fruit logo on the case.

@psergiu: You forgot that HDMI delivers the sound. So if you got an receiver with HDMI you don’t have to fuddle around with optical input or rely on crappy TV sound. In fact it’s a decent option to get rid off crappy TV sound even while watching TV ;)

@psergiu
Not sure what you mean by NO VGA in cons, as the Raspberry PI also doesn’t have it. Are you aware of this?

Also the AppleTV can decode MPEG2 in hardware, which the Raspberry can’t (due to lack of licensing)

@psergiu
I have 2 first gen and 1 2nd gen AppleTvs. You forgot that the AppleTv also has onboard storage. While your remarks regarding the jailbreak hold up for the iOS based devices STMLabs and openelec make it pretty trivial to install linux to unburden yourself of these restrictions on the Tiger based first get model.
I actually bought my second one by chance at a junk shop, set me back $10 US, plus a $17 Broadcom CrystalHD and $5 Realtek R8188 from eBay I now have HDMI with analog audio out, 160gb of storage, and wifi for less than I bought my RasPi for, that didn’t keep me from trying my damnedest to buy my Pi on launch day though.

its only so cheap because they intend to make the profit on iTunes sales, much like consoles are sold at cost price or a loss and the revenue is generated through game sales

Apple don’t subsidies hardware. They buy components buy the tanker load and have them assembled for a bowl of rice, so it’s very cheap to knock out their devices. They still make a profit even on a $99 ATV.

Apple essentially reuses the iPhone’s hardware platform for the AppleTV. iPhones are sold by the tens of millions, so Apple buys the components by the boat load and dirt cheap.

Even with the huge success the RPi had from launch, it will probably never see the same sales numbers.

To summarize: Yes, the AppleTV is a good deal, but that doesn’t mean the RPi isn’t – different target audiences, after all! :-)

Does it support network storage protocols for movies like SAMBA ?

yes it supports samba, nfs and afp, it also includes a samba server to easy store your content locally on a attached USB HDD/SSD/stick or on the SDcard over the network

I’d Google XBMC and have a look at what it can do.. there are lots of stuff it does, but I’ve never used it so don’t want to answer incorrectly.

Excited about this. Currently got a HTPC with XBMC, been using it since XBMP days. One question though, what about files with DTS sound? Will these play correctly?

ac3 and dts both works just fine. :)
http://wiki.xbmc.org/?title=XBMC_Features_and_Supported_Formats/Codecs#Supported_audio_codecs:

I know it works fine on x86 XBMC. Thats what I’m currently running. I mean will the RPi version support DTS passthrough?

OMG, now I want at least 3 of your little beauties!

i use xbmc on an old xbox as a media player for the tv in the bedroom., its an awesome media center with hundreds of plugins to add all sorts of functionality.

there is also a web interface to control it from your pc, but my favorite is the xbmc remote control app on my Android phone (i believe its also available for iPhone). you can fully control the player from it.

one of my favorite features is that it can connect to a samba share on my ubuntu server, so as I add media content to the folder it is available to the xbmc straight away.

there are also plugins to monitor and control utorrent,

The main difference between xbmc and openELEC is that openELEC have got rid of all the bloat and do different versions optimized for different processors and chip-sets. and although xbmc is available on a live cd, its no ay as good as the openELEC build running off a memory stick ! I am really looking forward to this release, its likely to be the Raspberry Pi’s Killer App…

…or, I’d wager, one of several killer apps!

Agreed, it all sounds great. My TV has a powered USB port and a wired ethernet port nearby, so the Rpi could basically just plugin. I do have some reservations as far as the android remote goes. I do prefer at least the option of an infrared so I can just access everything with my smart remote ike I do now with my Asus Oplay. Having to grab a different device to just pause a movie is a bad idea IMHO, so for a killer app someone should cook up a way to connect an IR receiver. Perhaps easy, there’s a uart on board, right?

you can buy all sorts of usb IR adaptors for a reasonable price and there are plugins available for different remotes.

the android app for xbmc works very well. there are two options, you can use the touch screen on the phone as a touch pad, or there are several different flavors of full feature remote some can even stream movies to the phone, Personally, I opt for the “official” version from the makers of XBMC.

I understand the concerns you have for using a android device for a remote, but in my case, I have not long upgraded handsets, so my old rooted HTC desire was recruited for the job, along with providing other useful functions that’s handy to have close by, like emails, quick web searches, TV guide, the sky+ app has a better search facility than the skyEPG. it makes a perfect remote for xbmc.

you can probably buy a cheap second hand android smartphone cheaper than you can buy a micro keyboard or ir adaptor and ir remote !

oh yeah, the on board UART… simples…

http://www.societyofrobots.com/electronics_irda_tutorial.shtml

Something simple like this should do the job as remote too – it will need some configuring but should work:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Windows-XP-Vista-7-linux-MCE-Media-Center-PC-Remote-controller-USB-IR-Receiver-/180727780787?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item2a143715b3

…….. i am just hoping that the RPi’s network adapter can manage the bandwidth required for HD media over a network. 1080p and 3d media, I have to copy the media to a local drive for it to play smooth on my laptop;using XBMC, (although I need to try openELEC) 720i stuff plays fine

I’ve not had any problems streaming full 1080p video via my 100Mbps network. Then again, I’m only one person, and the only person that uses my network so having a movie streaming at ~15Mbps isn’t really an issue.

But [before anyone bites my head off] that’s just me.

This is great! Am really looking forward to getting my hands on one!

Any news on weather the PVR plugins will be supported on the rpi? (stream live TV from a back end server?)

Spud

Hmm, £99 Apple TV3 (new 1080p version) or £30 RasPi running OpenELEC .. tough call.

99 for an ATV3 of a Pi with Openelec for 30?
A few things here,
Openelec/XBMC runs HULU and Amazon prime, BBC Iplayer, ITV, 4OD every other TV stream you can think of and even the Apple stuff.

Openelec/XBMC runs IPhoto, so you can see your photos from your IPhone, IPAD or whatever other rubbish you bought from that company, something Apple has said they hope to get that integrated in the ATV 3 in the future.
Its a NO BRAINER the Raspberry Pi is awesome!! And OpenElec

Hmm … i cannot seem to find anything that allows XBMC to browse a iPhoto Library *shared over the network*.
There is this: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?t=77612 but requires copying the library into XBMC. Useless when you have tens of thousands of photos. And not compatible with Aperture.

that’s one of the problems with any i[product] product from apple. its very propriety and usually very easy to connect with another apple i[product], but opt for something out of the fold, then forgot it. its how apple keep customers locked in.

i have a massive photo archive i manage with adobe bridge, keeping copies of all of my pictures on a samba share and also served on a ftp server, as jpegs. i near enough have access to all of my pictures from almost anywhere on any network connected device.

will it play virgin media player as thats stopped playing on ubuntu last year , i had to install wine on Linux to get virgin media player back , it would be koool to get it to play on Linux again without wine

Hi Maria,

I realise this is probably the wrong forum, but could you please post the steps you took to get VM Player running under WINE? I can’t get the player initialised – it just hangs.

What about the sound?

is the cec working?

I really want this to work.

Not yet, but it is coming…

Yay ! Juggling multiple remotes sucks.

great!!!

Farm Out! :-D

This is very good news.
My main plan about RPi is to use it as micro media center.
I already had home (media) server with running minidlna daemon on it.
Note that XBMC has excellent upnp client & server support.

I just wonder whether guys from OpenELEC implement X server back-end support to utilize GPU power, because XBMC’s GUI is sooo resource consuming!

Play that Youtube Movie full screen @480p and you will see near the end, when he’s shuffling around in the setup screens, that the video output is “Videocore” – it talks directly to the accelerated GPU, no X/frammebuffer.

Add a dual disk case running in raid 1 on the usb port (Fantec MR-25DRE, SilverStone DS221B), some smart power management and network protocol and you got a full blown multimedia nas :)

Great news, My second use for a RPi was XBMC, I have 3 in the house 2 running on old XBox 1’s and on a laptop for high def video. Plan on changing them all to RPi’s firstly for the enegy saving and secondly the old XBox’s cant come with High Def.

Need some more SD cards now already filled my 2 spares :)

lol, i have been buying xboxes from the local cash converters for £5 each, and setting them us as a media player with XBMC and selling them on for £20.. they make awesome little players !! but people have been asking for HD these days….

Great works! Some questions:
1) How much is the power consumption of the raspberry (maximum)? 2W?
2) Does it will play blu ray’s iso with navigation menus?
3) Does it has a function to search subs?
4) Does it has a torrent client?
5) It’s possible to move via wifi a file from a computer to the drive attached to the raspberry?

Thanks, sorry for the many questions but these are key feature to me

I think you want too much :)

1) Not much. Less than 5W during playback, but probably more than 2. 5v at about 700mA ish. See the WIki.
2) BluRay encryption has not been cracked, so Linux machines without encryptions keys cannot play back Bluray disks at all. You can play back rips
3) You need NCIS for that.
4) Any Linux client should work
5) Yes, that a standard Linux operation.

also: is this compatible with the remote xmbc applications for ipad/iphone?

It’s XBMC. So i think it is comptible :)

Get this to support the Boxee remote control and :-D

http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Boxee_Box_remote

XBMCLive running on my HTPC supports it out of the box, so I would assume (hope?) that OpenELEC does too… might be wrong though.

Per the cost of an Apple TV, remember that the actual cost of manufacturing of the R-Pi is somewhat less than $25/$35 in 10,000-unit batches, and the scale of Apple TV sales is at least two orders-of-magnitude larger than that of the R-Pi (well, for the next few months, until R-Pi production ramps up :) ). Given the volume and despite their higher component complexity, I would guess that Apple isn’t paying much more than $10 more each for manufacturing of Apple TVs than the R-Pi boards cost at their current relatively small volume. If R-Pi production can reach seven figures (or more? :) ) the costs will come down, increasing the amount of charitable funding profit the Foundation can earn. We can only hope!

Apple has also to pay licences for streaming HD Youtube, Vimeo & other stuff. As they are known to have margins around 50%, i guess their manufacturing price is around $40.

You’re both way off on those estimates.

iSuppli (who aren’t exactly conservative on their estimates since they have everything to gain from showing aggressive pricing) have suggested the material + manufacturing cost of the Apple TV 2 was $63.95. This is before all other costs such as licenses, shipping, etc kick in.

I suspect the new updated one will be very similar. It’s really not a profit generator for Apple.

Great work guys this is truly excellent.

Will we be able to the Netflix for Xbmc?
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/43724/how-to-view-netflix-watch-instantly-in-xbmc/
It is great to see so many options for the RPi! Entertainment is a big catalyst for education, all a kid needs to see is that they can have fun and they’ll do everything they can to learn.

netflix needs silverlight so won’t play on linux and moonlight won’t play netflix or lovefilm , DRM sucks lol

Since the Raspi doesn’t playback 720P/1080i MPEG in hardware, what are it’s capabilities in software?

It plays MPEG 4 and h.264 in hardware just fine. Try the FAQ before talking please.

I’m taking a guess here but maybe stattik means MPEG2 which is not hardware accelerated (at least not yet unless some licensing deal has been done).

While I’m here, is there any hardware acceleration for audio codecs?
Presumably those video samples have some audio, but what works and what will be too much for the CPU?

I’m guessing like my tablet stereo mp3 and aac ‘should’ be playable by the RPi but what about more heavyweight stuff like AC3 and DTS?

nNy audio codec is pretty easy to decode on the Arm compared with video, although the GPU can HW accelerate audio (but its not licensed.)

“Just fine” as in the video linked above? If you don’t know what video I’m referring to, it’s the one where the Avenger trailer, that’s at a considerably lower bitrate than the files most of us would play on the device, is stuttering and skipping all over the place.

I’m just as exited as anyone for RPi, but as it stands right now, the unit’s I’ll be getting will be for me to play with, not to replace my jailbroken AppleTV. (Oh, the trailer was 1080p and RPi plays 720P perfectly, you say? What a coincidence, XBMC on my ATV plays 720P perfectly as well, maybe I’ll wait until it does something substantially better than my old device before fire up the 3D printer to make a case for the board so my wife wont kill me for placing a naked board next to the TV)

I’m sure an OpenELEC-running RPi will completely outshine the ATV in the future, but right now it’s just full of unrealized potential.

The GPU itself is quite capable of glitch free 1080p30 decode of H264 (and indeed MPEG if enabled). It can also encode at that speed which is MUCH more difficult to do.
Whether the software you run on the Arm is capable of using that capability is up to that software.

cool stuff..

I would hate to ask but would I have to install a “Frontend” to support my ATI HDTV Wonder 650 USB? And will this support the use of other USB TV Tuners aswell?(Hauppauge seems to like Linux more?) Kinda hard question to ask when the production model is not out as of yet… Many hands + Many configurations = Much more support.

It seems menu lag is worse with the R-B Pi than on an ATV2? It can only be better on a ATV3 (when jailbroken). Concerning the price, you still need to have a case (nice looking) and remote (also nice looking), which will probably raise the price to approx. 80 $ (vs 99$ ATV3). Flexibility of the R-B Pi is of course bigger: (more) linux distro, usb, SD-card, … just my 2cts.

We expect case to be <$10, remotes, well, I suppose $10 would cover cheap one, judging by Ebay prices, although you would also need an IR receiver. $20 for both I reckon. So add another $30, you get to $65

In the UK, play are selling USB remotes for about £5 including the reciever – not sure if they are any good or not.

There is also the possible option, mentioned above, of using an android phone as a remote. If the android apps work with OpenElec then teh remote is free.

One of the reviewers says that they are using it for xbmc with linux, so that model should be ok.
Here is a link to setting up a different remote in linux :
http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=HOW-TO_Configure_your_Cyberlink_Media_Centre_Remote_for_XBMC_on_Linux

I,m not sure if that applies to the really cheap remotes, or only the cyberlink type though.
Texy

Even if ATV3 and RPi (+case+remote) did cost the same I would always go for the RPi bacause of the openess and flexiblity it provides.

If you think the menu lag is bad on the OpenElec demos on the RPi then just wait a couple of month and see… OpenElec states in their announcement that they still have som work to do and I would be surprised if things didn’t improve over time.

I am so excited I could actually burst, I think I need to calm down a bit

Hello,

This may not be the correct place to post but i don’t understand
how the Forum works here.

Is it true that the new OS “Fedora remix” has been optimized for
the GPU inside the Pi. It can therefor be used for multimedia things

thanks

Vince.

afaik, the first release doesn’t have much optimization – but they are working on it for future releases.

AFAIK there aren’t any X drivers available yet so the answer must be no. But OpenElec does when it shows the videos so it is probably only a matter of time….

Hello

i also want to ask you about openELEC. Do you think openELEC will give the Pi the ability to play any “http” movie stream from the network? (i believe it will) Say the movis is in .avi format or something.

Currently i was looking at other low price “network media players” but have found it impossible to find any info about how to play back a movie feed coming from some arbitrary “http” address.

Infact i found a youtube DEMO of the proof of concept for doing this “http” thing….but the guy had actually written a small APP to achieve the goal. The app was not commercial or available for download. He was demonstrating what i actually required the box to do. (but the box does not actually do it off the shelf)

thx

Vince.

I don’t know about http but it is perfectly possible when accessing files through SMB/Cifs (also known as Windows shares). If it is doable in XBMC then it is doable in OpenElec.

hello, i have double checked my requirement by asking in the XBMC forum. It’s perfectly possible to do what i require using XBCM and is quite common. THis therefor means openELEC will also be able to do this. THe only question is if the Pi has enough horsepower toplayback a DVD quality movie stream coming into it off the web….(i think it will be able to do this)

Bare in mind…it is VERY hard to find media players that can do raw “http”. I have only found one machine that can do it at 120 dollars…an Android TV box.

Wow, I’m waiting till international shipping will work fine and get me hands on the raspberry :) I’m more than happy to see XBMC running smoothly on raspberry :)

Yeah! Quite interesting for me. Could replace my PC for watching movies.

Hi! Can i connect an external (USB) DVD drive to my rasberry pi?
Thank you!

yes…..

Probably.

Good Question on two parts…. An external drive would be detected depending on the Linux Distro support and it would have to be “Mounted” for it to be used. The second part needs to be answered by a R-Pi Tech… Can the R-Pi supply 500ma to each USB Port?(If not then you may need a compatible “Powered USB Hub”) Some external drives may have their own power supply but some will only use power from the USB port.

Superb – I’m going to be buying yet more boards :)

Will there be away to run android on the device

If someone ports it, we think earlier version may run OK. ICS maybe not.

hehe. Mac settings logo

I’d love to know how many of the 10k initial batch will end up as media players. However impressive XBMC is on the RPi, I think it is a waste.

If I wanted a 1080p media player that can play from USB, I can get one from amazon for £21.99 including case PSU and remote control.

There are so many people with innovative ideas on the forums that it makes my head spin. It’s a shame that these people (forum people) didn’t get the chance to get their hands on one of the 10k RPi’s before the media player masses.

It’s not a waste, those £21.99 media players from Amazon don’t run XBMC and they don’t come with a LAN connection which is a major consideration for people who want a media player. Besides the more that sell the better for the RPI Foundation – you dodn’t get one from the first batch (me either) so get over it.

Media players, in whatever guise, have been done to death. There’s hardly anything new and innovative about taking a file from either USB or a network and putting it on a screen….The RPi is a platform for new ideas and rehashing existing products is, in my mind, a waste.

There’s no figures to show one way or the other how many Raspi;s have been ordered just for use as media players. Everyone had an equal chance. However, its up to the buyer what to do with them – it’s not as if we can order the distributors to only sell to those people who don’t want to use it as a media player (and how would you do that anyway?).

I was just commenting that taking an exciting platform and turning it into a media player is about as much of a waste as turning it into a One For All…..It’s just my opinion.

I will be using XBMC on my R-Pi for relaxing and then when I want to do something more creative, I will simply swap out the SD card and boot another OS. That is the beauty of it.

This is the main reason I wanted to buy an RPi.
It will replace my 2 xbmc xboxs and be used as a protable media center.
The earlier xboxs could play SOME HD stuff (720p).
One of mine plays 720p stuff (and x264) fine.
The other one struggles with x264 (which is strange, it SHOULD be fine),
But definitely dies when you try and play HD stuff.
Both output at 1080i, so the GUI looks amazing. (+ it upscales movies etc)
Sadly the one game I have written to output 1080i (Enter the Matrix),
won’t work when in 1080i mode, it just says the disc is scratched =(

But yeah, xbmc is amazing.
Definietly worth putting on an SD card.
That’s one plus of the pi, you can have lots of different OS’s just sitting on other SD cards and just swap them out when you want.

Thank you guys for your response : http://www.raspberrypi.org/faqs#comment-15083

I should have waited one more day before posting this :P

I think I’ll buy some…

I really like the apple remote. It is small, elegant and efficient. Perfect for openelec.
Can I use the apple remote with openelec?
I realize that I have to add an IR receiver for that.
As I understand it GPIO would require soldering. What is the easiest way to add an IR receiver?
Where would I buy a cheap and easy to install USB or GPIO receiver?
Don’t want to waste money on the AppleTV.

Yes, this is all well and good. But as I think we saw in the post “Adieu to the database errors” and the comments for Pete Stevens from Mythic Beasts the really important unanswered question here is: ‘Is kitten morphing native in OpenELEC?’. If not, will we be able to download a kitten morphing package? And if we have to download it are the directions for configuring it to be left up to Pete again?

Does the operating system have app support?
Is the app support wide?

Does the R-Pi output 720p and 1080p, or only 1080i/p?

Reason being, my TV is only 720p. No need to have the r-pi calculate unnecessary pixels; 720p output would decrease power usage, and improve performance for this resolution.

Device autodetects screen resolution. As to output/render resolution, not sure how the GPU decides what resolution to render. I think that’s the applications decision. The GPU then scales to fit the device as appropriate.

I’m not sure what you mean by app support. You can download any compatible applications from the Fedora repository – there are lots of them (10’s of thousand I would think). Not all will run well, as they may require more horsepower.

I wonder when the we will start to see news posts along the lines of “Raspberry Pi not as fast as speculated”

Yesterday?

Once the Pi has a model available with case and power brick, I will simply have to own one with this OS and XBMC. Want, with much droolipating.

Can OpenELEC also run a web browser ?

I hope so. every page I go to dodges around this, so I know how you feel. Worse, instead of simply running uTorrent, it pretends to by letting you control uTorrent that is running on another machine. People don’t realize how crippling it is to only have access to Linux-only “banned on sight” Torrent clients. If I hear a yea or nay on the Firefox (let’s face it, you either run Firefox or an imitation) situation, I’ll post about it here- and I hope if you hear if they ever stop *pretending* to support uTorrent, you’ll do the same.

am i the only one disappointed with how slow the interface is? maybe a minimalist xbmc skin can overcome the 5-6 seconds it takes to load a section. worth investigating i suppose

It’s early days, and at the moment the X driver isn’t accelerated which may cause slowdowns. Still, low bandwidth skins are a sensible approach.

I thought that openELEC guys have implemented that feature (to hardware accelerate GUI)

It would be of great interest to the Foundaton if they have accelerated X with OpenGLES!

It’s surprising to see the OpenELEC OS sees only 121 MB RAM as total memory on Model B boards… Maybe half of it is allocated to the GPU and the OS doesn’t aware of it…

OpenELEC (XBMC) will only work with 128MB Video Memory, so its needed to use the 128/128MB Memory/Video split, because of this for sure the OS can use and see only 128MB

Apple TV 2+3 does not do 24 fps which makes it useless if you dislike judder. Apple TV 1 with Crystal HD is till my choice as it does 1080p24. Raspberry Pi might replace this combo if they manage to get faster menus and start of video, than what is shown in video.

Where (link) can I download the OpenELEC ISO/Bin file for RaspberryPi?

I can confirm this works a treat, I downloaded a prebuilt open elec img and wrote it to the sd card using dd, I was up and running in minutes, and watching true HD quality media from my network (SMB) shared drive, using my android phone as a remote. Fast forward is a little bit slow, but skip forward 5 seconds works perfectly, given I have put zero effort into optimizing it, im pretty happy.

It sees only half the ram as it has a ramdisk created, which if I had a high performance SD card, and put some more effort in, I could probably do away with and get better performance.

Liz, do you have any idea how long it might be before the OpenELEC distro is likely to appear on the download page.
I would try to create the SD card myself from the OpenELEC file downloads that are already available, but the Raspi is my first Linux computer, all the instructions on how to create the SD card assume you already have a desktop Linux computer of some type.

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