pre-install question

[raspberry_pd]

Hi

h264 is built into the Raspberry Pi for free. VC-1 and MPG2 cost a little extra and AFAIK no distribution bundles them. Individual usesr need to purchase one or both and add them to their systems.

It is quite possible that DTS and Dolby Digital licenses to enable the completed GPU-assisted decoding of those codecs that is already baked into XBMC/omxplayer, will be available soon. See this thread for details:

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=15546

It is my experience that a 1920x1040 DTS 5.1 file from a NAS box over wired network via SMB protocol, plays smoothly since the release of XBian 1.0a4. I really do not know why. However there is still room for improvement and hopefully the GPU-assitance licenses will fill that gap.

I think you will find XBian a very satisfying Raspberry Pi based boot-to-XBMC distribution. I also tried Raspbmc then OpenELEC many moons ago before adopting XBian.