"XBMC center fared slightly better in our testing, but not much. It boots up fast enough (as does Debian) and works more or less as advertised, provided you're the patient type. The now ubiquitous 1080p copy of
Big Buck Bunny took about 15 to 20 seconds to load up from a USB key, but once it did, played reasonably smoothly, audio included. We also loaded up a decidedly busier clip -- a 720p copy of the Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Miguel Cotto fight -- and it was also reasonably stutter free experience. Though, we angered the Pi when we tried (but did not succeed) to skip past the ring entrances and straight to the bout. Web-based content was a completely different story. We managed to install the Engadget and YouTube add-ons, but both failed to deliver. Launching an episode of the Engadget show took several minutes and, once the video began playing back, we were presented with what amounted to a slide show of the
nicest guy in tech delivering his opening monologue. YouTube was an even more disastrous endeavor, crashing the entire system, forcing us to pull the plug."