Banana Pi The new Raspberry? for £34 1GB RAM and GB Ethernet!

C.R.A.Z.Y said:
Not even close, IR receiver is about 99p, USB WiFi can be had for £5 on ebay (WiFi sucks for a media player), PSU again £5. It already has a NIC.

Most people have the spare parts needed to get a Pi up and running (Small SD, USB Pen, Old Micro charger ...etc
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I have read a few people having problems due to cack PSUs, the guideline is that you need 1.2a for stability once you get XBMC running and the likes of WiFi drawing on the USB. I only have one rated that high in my house and I need it for my tablet, would guess many people are similar. It costs at least £10 delivered to get a proper quality one rather than some Chinese junk that is rated at twice the capacity it is built for, but feel free to have crashes or a house fire to save a couple of quid.

Likewise a link to this 99p delivered IR receiver would also be appreciated. Note it needs to support full power on/off and everything else by default in OpenELEC, good luck as I have been looking for a good one for a while for an Ion Build I have ;). The only one I have tried that works as well as the one in the NUC is the old Microsoft Windows Media boxes. These are massive, ugly and the last one on eBay sold for £24 inc delivery LINK.

Also no wonder your WiFi sucks if you are using a £5 card of eBay, mine streams 1080P happily and saves the cost and mess of either running a cable or buying power line adapters. Also known to work perfectly with OpenElec and XBMCbuntu, no research, risk or hassle. Would be surprised is a half decent £10 stick performed as well and as easily, but that would be a fairer comparison.

Finally still no case included, just checked and you can now get some for £2 delivered of eBay, though style and quality is lacking. For me a PCB hanging out the back of my tv is not an option, if I was building a Pi I would pay a few quid more to get a case I could happily look at.

It's different strokes for different folks, but saying it is £35 to £200 is daft. Yes you CAN get something that works for £35 with the Pi, but it does not have the quality and functionality that most people are looking for. I bet most Pi owners using it for XBMC have spent £50+ by the time they included the bits to finish it. Around twice the cost, but much more powerful, better looking, faster and more futureproof. I have been looking for the perfect XBMC system since it was Xbox Media Player running on a hard modded Xbox, this NUC is the closest I have found for an affordable price (and I have tried a lot).
 
sibeer said:
Likewise a link to this 99p delivered IR receiver....
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RPi supports CEC unlike the NUC (unless you pay out for the Pulse Eight addon); similarly you can use the various tablet/mobile remote apps - so IR isn't really needed.


sibeer said:
It costs at least £10 delivered to get a proper quality one...
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You can get genuine Samsung/Belkin 2A chargers for around £4/5 but any decent charger that outputs 1-1.5A is perfectly fine - i've got no issues here using 1-1.5A chargers on my collection of overclocked RPi's.

Either way, £40 (RPi, charger, case) vs roughly £250 (£224 for the NUC + RAM) is still a hefty difference for a simple media player.
As you say though, 'horses for courses' :)
 
You can use the XBMC Remote app with the NUC, but personally I prefer to use a remote control. As with a lot of people with a full media install (projector, tv, amp, blu-ray, HD-DVD (yes I know), XBMC, etc) I use a multi remote (harmony) to make controlling it clean and easy. Admittedly this is not a required feature, nor to everyone's wishes, but it is quite a common need for XBMC people.

Also it is £100 for the Bay Trail NUC, not £224, that is a big difference.

I only mentioned it here as clearly the original poster and potentially those viewing the thread are looking for a more powerful XBMC experience than a Pi. The NUC is just that, a more complete and powerful solution. It is a reasonable cost to me, but it isn't as cheap as a Pi.
 
sibeer said:
...but personally I prefer to use a remote control.
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Again, CEC would solve that issue.

sibeer said:
Also it is £100 for the Bay Trail NUC, not £224, that is a big difference.
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Is it available? As a quick Google doesn't seem to return uk stockists and the cheapest NUC i can find is a 'Forest Canyon' :confused:

sibeer said:
The NUC is just that..
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There's still plenty of other 'boards' that are better spec'd than the RPi, run XBMC and cheaper than a NUC - like a CuBox-i for example.

Any way, we're massively derailing this thread so i guess we should agree to disagree :p
 
YarwoodUK said:
I've not looked too much into Pi's for XMBC/Streaming etc, so forgive me for the newb question.

Reckon a Banana pi would be able to stream 1080 movies to my TV and run iPlayer and whatnot?
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If they actually exist and the software will run on them, yes. Bear in mind they are nothing to do with the raspberry pi fundation, and are just a korean (I think) rip with a similar name...
 
sibeer said:
I have read a few people having problems due to cack PSUs, the guideline is that you need 1.2a for stability once you get XBMC running and the likes of WiFi drawing on the USB. I only have one rated that high in my house and I need it for my tablet, would guess many people are similar. It costs at least £10 delivered to get a proper quality one rather than some Chinese junk that is rated at twice the capacity it is built for, but feel free to have crashes or a house fire to save a couple of quid.

Likewise a link to this 99p delivered IR receiver would also be appreciated. Note it needs to support full power on/off and everything else by default in OpenELEC, good luck as I have been looking for a good one for a while for an Ion Build I have ;). The only one I have tried that works as well as the one in the NUC is the old Microsoft Windows Media boxes. These are massive, ugly and the last one on eBay sold for £24 inc delivery LINK.

Also no wonder your WiFi sucks if you are using a £5 card of eBay, mine streams 1080P happily and saves the cost and mess of either running a cable or buying power line adapters. Also known to work perfectly with OpenElec and XBMCbuntu, no research, risk or hassle. Would be surprised is a half decent £10 stick performed as well and as easily, but that would be a fairer comparison.

Finally still no case included, just checked and you can now get some for £2 delivered of eBay, though style and quality is lacking. For me a PCB hanging out the back of my tv is not an option, if I was building a Pi I would pay a few quid more to get a case I could happily look at.

It's different strokes for different folks, but saying it is £35 to £200 is daft. Yes you CAN get something that works for £35 with the Pi, but it does not have the quality and functionality that most people are looking for. I bet most Pi owners using it for XBMC have spent £50+ by the time they included the bits to finish it. Around twice the cost, but much more powerful, better looking, faster and more futureproof. I have been looking for the perfect XBMC system since it was Xbox Media Player running on a hard modded Xbox, this NUC is the closest I have found for an affordable price (and I have tried a lot).
Click to expand...

My WiFi works great thanks but is limited due to bandwidth (when I said sucks I mean NO WiFi is going to be able to reliably stream 40-50GB Blu Ray VC1 MKV's as they simply cannot keep up with the bitrate (Where-as wired works perfect on my Pi for streaming 40-50GB VC1 MKV's))

People who spend £50 setting up a Pi are indeed silly as at that price you have better options, however a LOT of people who buy the Pi get it up and running using cheap second hand ebay parts or old redundant parts they have hanging around gathering dust.
(I used an old 16GB Corsair GT USB2 pen, old 32GB Kingston Class 10 MicroSD, £1.99 ebay TSOP4838 Vishay Photodiode , IR Receiver , 38Khz combined with an old Xbox 360 remote (I can use CEC but did this cheap mod incase I take my setup somehere that the TV doesn't support CEC), £4.99 N-Wireless USB (ebay SH), old redundant 1TB USB2 2.5" HDD, old redundant USB2 Blu-Ray 6X reader, £1.99 USB Hub,

So for the price of the Pi and an extra £9 I now have a very capable Media player that has 1TB of local storage, Blu-Ray/DVD/CD support, CEC & IR control, Wifi & Wired NIC and in doing so managed to utilize a load of gear that was sitting around doing jack other than gathering dust ;-)

Admittedly not everyone is going to have as much old 'tech' lying around as I have but I think it's fair to say many people will have the bare essentials to get the Pi up and running (USB2 Pen, small SD or MicroSD card, old 1-1.5a phone charger)
 
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