So I brought to watch Star Wars and has agreed to watch the other movies. Tomorrow we are going to watch Episode 4 and 5, but since it is New Year Eve, I do not want to carry my laptop to school. So I downloaded a MKV 1080 (the format the movies are in) sample and booted up the Pi.
I couldn't find a video player so had to search online to see if it had one. Only two players work well, Omxplayer and XBMC player (both use hardware accelerated GPU). Omxplayer comes preinstalled but has to be launched with the terminal, simply by typing omxplaer file.mvk. Before that I would recommend typing oxmplayer -h to see a list of options (especially if you want audio through the HDMI).
When I typed omxplayer -h, I learned that omxplayer is sort of a test bed for the XBMC player.
Opon more reading, I found out there are three (popular) versions of XBMX players for the RPi; Raspbmc/OSMC (newer version is called OSMC), OpenElec, and XBian.
Raspmc is simply Raspberry with XBMC, OpenElec is simply XBMC (no full OS under the hood) and Xbian is XMBC built upon Raspbian, making it in between Raspmc and OpenElec.
OpenElec boots the fastest, Raspmc the slowest, and Xbian is in the middle (note: boot time. Performance is the same for video play back.) Same for amount of space needed for OS, with Raspmc being the most, and OpenElec the least. One interesting thing to note however, is that Xbian receives updates much faster and more frequently than Raspmc.
Conclusion: Xbian seems to be in between and perfect, if you have a spare memory card lying around. I shall give it a shot.
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