Please help me decide on right hardware for HTPC

Initially I was thinking about buying some AM1 motherboard but only yesterday I found out about Gizmo 2 and all those SBC's powered by ARM.

As for Gizmo 2 - it seems to me that it's way overpriced ($199.0) compered to some ARM SBC's (like ODROID-U3). But on the other hand it's AMD so it would give me better software choice.

And regarding ARM solutions - first of all I just have no idea what kind of board would be good enough for me? I basically use my PC for 3 things only: surfing the net (80 of time), watching movies (x264 mostly, some divx) and listening to the music (mp3, ogg, flac).

There is one thing I like very much about those ARM based SBC's - power consumption. An 8 core ARM processor (Cubieboard 4) uses only 3.1W at idle in Xorg, and maximum power consumption is about 22W at full stress. This is just amazing. But there is also one thing that I'm not so fond of those ARM boards - software support. AFAIK it is much more limited than x86 processors. And I'm not sure if it's going to change in near future?

To sum it up - I just don't know what kind of hardware I should choose? What would be best for my needs?

I would appreciated it very much if somebody could help me with this subject.


p.s.
I'm not considering any Intel or NVidia based platforms. And if anyone what's to know why - here's my reason:
http://www.reddit.com/r/AMD/wiki/sabotage

I think you should determine first what services you wish to run on this system, then determine a distribution and whether or not there are any known glitches in running any of the OS, services, or applications, on ARM architectures.

Instinctively I'd stage this with a full up x86 architecture and once I understood how I wanted my media server, I might consider an ARM SBC after I understood my processing power needs.

I'm sorry but I don't know what you mean by "what services to run"? As for distribution (or OS rather) - I don't know it either. I'm a Windows user. But if I'm not mistaken it all depends on hardware that I will choose. If I go with AMD, I will have almost unlimited choices in both Linux and BSD distros. If I go with ARM - I will have Android (don't know literally anything about this OS), and very few Linux and BSD systems. And since Android is totally unknown to me, I would rather pick some Linux or BSD distro. But I already stated what I use my PC for, so maybe this Android will be as good as Linux? Or maybe Linux and BSD support for ARM is better than I would thought it is? (but I'm pretty sure it's not as good as for AMD)

So as you can see it's a bit complicated.


p.s.
If only MintBox Mini by Fit-PC was $100 cheaper I would buy it straightaway.

I think a raspberry pi 2 with openelec is fully supported and perfectly works for "surfing the net (80 of time), watching movies (x264 mostly, some divx) and listening to the music (mp3, ogg, flac)".

I'd recommend you not consider Android. That is something which runs on phones and tablets and provides mainly touch screen applications.

Note that you can run Linux distributions on ARM based boards, Debian, Ubuntu are two of them which I've seen much of on ARM systems, also Yocto.

Linux is what I feel you want.

HTPC = Home Theater Personal Computer

Therefore services means multimedia and server based services which provide the content you wish to use for this home theater.

I'd recommend you start with a full x86 PC and run one of the ready made desktop Linux distributions and learn a bit more about Linux in general before you make the more complicated decisions about how you wish to configure it, and what software works best for you.

My recommendations for Linux distribution suggestions would be any of: Ubuntu, MINT Cinnamon, or Debian.

Originally Posted by rtmistler I'd recommend you start with a full x86 PC and run one of the ready made desktop Linux distributions and learn a bit more about Linux in general before you make the more complicated decisions about how you wish to configure it, and what software works best for you.

Thank you very much for your help. That is exactly what I'm going to do now.

i recommend:
http://kodi.tv/

they have a target for raspberry-pi in their downloads section.

Thanks for this recommendation but I think I will be good with just mpv and mpd Besides web browsing is much more important for me.

I think you are still better off with an x86/amd option. In the future the arm may be the only way to go but right now I think better support for maybe an atom class system.

Those ARM SBC's look so good (at least on paper) that I'd like to buy one if I can find a right one for me.

But one thing bothers me about hardware-accelerated video playback. I just checked wiki page for Raspberry Pi and it states:

The Raspberry Pi features a Broadcom BCM2835 SoC. The SoC is not Open Hardware.

So my question would be - are there any ARM SBC's that have full open source support for 2D graphics in Linux?