XMBMC Remote App adding Hosts problem

Using XMBC Remote App (official one) on your Samsung Galaxy S5 (mini) and you want to add Hosts to be controlled?

The first time you start the app you will slightly get the following problem:

Empty_xmbc_hosts

The Hosts Screen will be empty. No Button to add hosts.

The solution for that is:

Hold down the MultiTask Button

And then you will see the UI to add hosts etc.

XBMC_Hosts_is_working

This issue is also reported in: https://code.google.com/p/android-xbmcremote/issues/detail?id=605

Hopefully they will fix that in the next release to make it more user friendly.

Banana Pi a better raspberry pi

Since serveral month, many Pis are in use within my network. I am using them for XBMC Raspberry, Syslog Raspberry, Kippo Raspberry Pi, surveillence pi, Nagios Raspberry Pi, Backup Pi a TOR Raspberry pi and of course they are using UPS for power supply.

But since some of the use cases are not that trivial, the tech specs of the raspberry are not high enough. But now a new pi is on the road: Banana Pi.

Specs of the Banana Pi (bold most important ones):
SoC: Allwinner A20*
(ARM Cortex-A7 dual-core, 1GHz, Mali400MP2 GPU)
System Memory 1GB DDR3 DRAM
Storage: SD card slot, Extensible with SATA connection
Video output: HDMI, Composite, Extensible with on-board LVDS connector
Audio I/O: HDMI,3.5mm stereo jack output,On-board microphone input
Connectivity: Gigabit Ethernet
USB: 2* USB 2.0 ports, 1* OTG micro USB port,1* micro USB for power supply**
Expansion: Extensible 26-pin headers, Camera connector, Display connector for LVDS and touch screen
Misc: 3* on-board buttons, (Power, Reset, Uboot key), IR receiver
Dimensions: 92mm X 60 mm
Weight: 48 g

Wow! It has gigabit onboard, an faster CPU (with integrated GPU!) , double Sytem memory, is compatible to extension modules of the original Raspberry Pi.

Especially for multimedia use cases, like HD (1080p and even higher) streaming the Banana Pi looks quite nice. At the moment, XBMC is not fully compatible to the banana pi, but the bigger the fan group the faster XBMC will work on supporting the new toy.

I will try to get one of the boards to get a first impression and will write about it in the future.

A good review of Banana pi is available at: http://raspi.tv/2014/banana-pi-review-first-impressions. The author is describing some problems while installation, but I think that is a common problem for new products. One particular complaint is very interesting, he mentioned that the linux SD card image is bigger then needed, because they included free space to the image – what a pitty.

Raspberry Pi with Amazon Prime Video Flatrate

Nachdem Amazon einen neuen Bestandteil von Amazon Prime angekündigt hat, stellt sich natürlich die Frage, ob auch ein Plugin für Amazon Prime Video on Demand für den Raspberry Pi bzw. raspbmc / XBMC kommen wird.

Vermutlich haben viele Nutzer einen Raspberry Pi als Mediacenter an ihrem Fernseher und würden sich darüber freuen, den Pi als Streaming client für Amazon Prime nutzen zu können.

Ein Plugin für den Raspberry Pi und Lovefilm, die Amazon Tochter, gibt es meines Wissens nach auch schon. Eine Ankündigung, dass Kindle Fire unterstützt wird, hab es schon.

Update 28.02.2014:
Evtl. hilft dieses Repo aus diesem Artikel.