Thanks nimnul, I did find what you pointed to. I also found XBMCfreak which also releases a live CD image

I will probably download a copy and install it on the asrock. From what I have read it should be a simple change to go from the HTTP api to the JSON api, especially since I want it as a control interface only. In fact I am using very similar code to control the XBMC system, a Dune player, a Vudu player and a Sony CX7000ES mega changer.

I need to do regression and feature testing to ensure that all the tables are correct.

In operation a button press makes a queue entry of text that contains, the component routine for sending, and the command name to send ( e.g. workQue.unshift("SendXBMC('CursorDown')"); ). This guarantees that user actions are always caught and preserved. The work que is inspected FIFO and an entry is used as the argument of an eval function executing the correct transmission function with the provided parameter.The send function uses a TCPIP library to build a socket, connect, send, receive a reply, process it with the correct analysis function and finally release the socket. All tcpip work is done async, with the assumption that only one tcpip request is in operation at a time. This is reasonable for a control only environment.