First off I need a disclaimer. This will be a bit of a rant which will
hopefully let me vent some frustration and maybe if I'm lucky discover
some useful information.
--- Start of RANT ---
If you care about how your home theater setup looks and how hard it is
to maintain then having a PC as a central part of it is an AWFUL thing.
Don't get me wrong, VDR itself is great but there's just no way to make
a PC as practical as something like an XBox as the actual physical
front-end. and believe me.. I've tried. I've tried so god damn hard
that I'm close to losing my mind. I've sunk thousands of hard earned
dollars (that I couldn't really afford but determination does awful
things to your finances) into trying to make a PC integrate well into a
home theater setup.
Today I nearly threw the fucking PC through the wall in frustration. I
recently purchased an XBox solely for use to playback xvid's and DVD's
(integrating as many functions into one capable unit as possible
GREATLY simplifies things for some users such as my parents) and with a
remote control it cost me less than any single component I purchased
for the PC (of which there were many).
In my humble opinion maintaining a server which isn't trying to pretend
to be a PVR that fits in well with home theater gear would be much,
MUCH simpler and cheaper. And an XBox connected to a network with such
a server on it would make for an extremely cheap and powerful front-end
that doesn't require any thought to be put into hardware, just
software.
Using the XBox for watching DVD's and xvids has well as listening to
music has been a revelation. It starts up quickly, it turns off with
the press of a button. If anything locks up you can turn it off, then
on and reload the interface faster than a PC would take just to turn
off. If digital TV (including recording) could be made this easy and
combined with the other features great features of XBMC then it would
be unstoppable and only lacking in the HDTV department (next XBox for
that I guess).
This is an unplanned post and hasn't been fully thought out. It's just
something I needed to get off my chest. Any pointers to things which
aren't too complicated which could help me get what I'm after would
also be appreciated.
Also please not that there is no suggestion as to how to make a PC more
user friendly in a home theater setup would be useful. The Xbox already
does everything right in that respect at a fraction of the cost.
--- End RANT ---
To sum things up I'm not asking for VDR to change into something else
(unless that's necessary for this sort of thing to even be possible but
I doubt that). All I really want to know is if any work on an XBMC
frontend to VDR ("My TV" anyone?) is being done by anyone anywhere. Is
it possible? Why or why not?
P.S. I suspect the primary problem is Microsoft and the proprietary
nature of the XDK. This prevents the sort of people who would normally
work on such things from even contemplating them. Is this a reasonable
guess? Might this change once an open-source development environment is
made available (work on such a thing is being done).
