Is the raspberry Pi any good as an XBMC media centre? I want to play all my videos in 1080p (from NAS) in various formats (MKV, DIVX, AVI etc) Iv read a few reviews but i cant believe a £30 piece of hardware will run everything with any reliability. Any advice gratefully received.
I have a raspberry pi which I'm mainly using for experimenting at the moment, but wouldn't recommend it for anything serious -- haven't used it for xbmc but the desktop is pretty laggy. I'm actually looking at getting an ODROID-U2 which looks much more powerful (has the same processor as the Galaxy SIII, Galaxy Note etc.)l -- it's more expensive but still pretty cheap, more info on http://www.hardkernel.com/renewal_2011/products/prdt_info.php?g_code=G135341370451 You can install Android, Ubuntu and possibly other distros on it, and it seems quite a few people have run XBMC on it. There is also the older/cheaper ODROID-U.
It will do what you want, but the interface is sluggish as others have said. And it just pissed me off because my media collection is enormous and scrolling through took forever, once I had found what I wanted it played virtually everything with ease. Only hiccups I remember were with 10Gb MKV files, but I suspect newer software has ironed that out.
It'll do high-bitrate 1080p video happily without any issues.... until you add DTS to the equation - There's no hardware decoding so the poor pi falls over immediately under any 720p+ DTS stream. The foundation have tried to license the h/w decode ability without success. (The Pi is capable, just restricted by license)
mine played everything i threw at it, though it was probably my av receiver decoding the DTS. i found loading folders of lots of files to be pretty slow, but otherwise everything else was fine.
