Raspberry Pi reaches critical mass as XBMC hardware

For years I’ve been dreaming of a streaming media device that could just be stuck to the back of a television. Since XBMC has been far and away my favorite set-top box software, I’ve closely monitored hardware developments that can run that package. Now I think it’s time to declare that the Raspberry Pi has achieved the base specifications to be branded the XBMC device that rules them all.

When I first tried out XBMC on the Raspberry Pi, I was floored to learn that the board ships without MPEG-2 hardware decoding. That is a huge deal breaker as everything I record over the air (using ATSC tuners and MythTV) uses that codec. Well, that issue has been remedied. For a few bucks (I think it cost me $3.30) you can now buy a license that is extremely easy to install. I paid with Paypal, then copied and pasted the code that was sent back to me into a text file to the SD card.

Now the RPi can playback the 1080i mpeg recordings with ease. I’m running OpenElec and there’s even support on the way to use XBMC as a PVR frontend (the MythTV add-on isn’t quite ready for beta testing yet but soon).