Settling in with the Shuttle

Ok now that the B3 is working so well, I have had more time to actually use the thing and it's going quite well in all. No major nasties to report, certainly seems as stable as my Camelot install, and it's of course completely silent which is a big bonus - but other than that in practise it is really much the same as my ASRock.

The one big feature I really miss from the maverick/XBMCFreak installs is the better/brighter video quality. I plan to update the NVidia drivers soon, to get the new colorrange options - this will mean the need for 'vdpau studio levels' or a brightness boost/contrast drop of 56/43 will be obviated. Hopefully these drivers play nicely with Dharma without unhoped for issues :)

My current thinking is I will move to final release Dharma with the latest NVidia drivers as my stable platform, and then experiment with the ASRock and SVN versions until a nice stable SVN seems to be around (I really want the 'delay video start by x seconds' feature that SVN currently has - this will make for a much neater, immediately in sync video play startup).

This is how you update the nvidia drivers:
http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=XBMCbuntu#Method_4:_Using_X_Updates_repository

It is MUCH nicer to have to two toys to play with (even if they're not quite the same hardware, the processes are really much the same for each). Previously having jsut one set up meand always being worried about breakage - now if it goes wrong I can always pop the other player in temporarily...