Raspberry Pi - $35 Linux computer

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Woden said:
How does this work out as a media player?

Will it run netflix/iplayer?
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I have no problems playing my tv shows and movies on it (biggest movie file was 14gb with DTS)

That was testing both upnp and local HDD, OS was Xbian with no overclock

One thing I did notice was around 10fps and around 6% usage between Raspbmc and Xbian (however haven't tested Alpha 5 vs new Raspbmc update yet)


If you do get 1 make sure to keep with confluence skin (don't even go near Aeon)
 
Ive given up on using this as a media centre, its just not good enough.

I'll give it another shot during the week, seeing as they've released an update for Raspbmc
 
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In response to the previous post...

I use my Raspberry Pi as a media centre every day, and it is good enough. Admittedly it does require specific tweaking to get the required result, but it does work.
 
What do you guys recommend?

Openelec or raspbmc?

I couldn't stream 1080p with openelec without it being very jerky. (HDD connected to router). This may be due to the transfer speeds of my old HDD drive though.
 
Rather than the HDD speed, I'd guess that the jerky playback would be due to one of the following:

1) Data transfer was via a Samba share
2) Audio pass-through was disabled and the RPi was down-sampling the audio
3) The movie file had a few audio tracks

As far as solutions go:

1) Don't use Samba, it's just too much overhead for the RPi to cope with. NFS is a much lighter protocol if your router can provide it.
2) Always enable audio pass-through for streams that your receiver can handle. For other audio streams then a small overclock can smooth out the playback.
3) The RPi just hasn't got enough grunt on the CPU to handle this, especially if 2) also applies.
 
Can somebody please tell me how you set up NFS with a Windows 7 machine/Raspbmc? There seems to be tens of different guides. All I want is a client/application/simple guide that makes folders on my PC accessible through NFS with the Pi downstairs.

Evilpaul - just noticed your comment about routers supporting NFS. Is it more of a high end/premium feature? Our Netgear G routers looks pretty standard.
 
I don't know of any routers that provide NFS, but that doesn't mean that they don't exist. I suspect most consumer routers are targeted at the Windows environment and as such would not provide NFS or other *nix focussed protocols.
 
For some high bit-rate VC1 1080p Blu Ray ripps I have found the network card on the Pi simply isn't good enough :-(
I tried streaming it from both Samba and NFS (Hacked Humax) neither solved the problem, however when the exact ripp was placed on a HDD and connected local to the Pi it played perfect without the buffering issues.

My Pi is heavily overclocked and plays pretty much everything 1080p over Samba except a few very large VC1 blu-ray ripps. Hopefully future Raspbmc will improve the nic drivers to solve this but tbh 98% of my 1080p videos work perfect so it's not a big issue for me.
 
Evilpaul said:
Something like scp (or winscp if your 2nd machine runs windows) would be better as it's a straight file transfer, rather than mucking around with copy/pasta.
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Insane_Homer said:
Simplest way I can think of is to use Putty from a windows machine to access the pi via telnet/ssh.

then use vi to create the file and copy and paste the content before saving.
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Thank you for you help and input,it worked like a dream.
just have to put it on a bigger card now ,4GB too small and work out how to reboot without an error on MySQL
 
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I've found the new version of raspmc much better at handling DTS downsampling - Even over samba I get perfect playback
 
Longbow said:
Oh I read that as "doesn't", my bad.
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I did a backup and restore which worked perfectly

If you wish to make a backup, you can do so via SSH or the command line with a keyboard attached by executing the following commands

tar -czf xbmc-backup.tar.gz .xbmc

And then after transferring the xbmc-backup.tar.gz to your newly installed Pi, running this command to restore:

sudo initctl stop xbmc && tar -xzf xbmc-backup.tar.gz && sudo initctl start xbmc
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Taken the plunge and ordered one along with a 64GB card. Time to back up my (rather large) DVD collection. Can't do my blurays, don't have a drive in my PC :(

Guess I may actually use the HT I paid extra for on this i7.
 
Woden said:
Taken the plunge and ordered one along with a 64GB card. Time to back up my (rather large) DVD collection. Can't do my blurays, don't have a drive in my PC :(

Guess I may actually use the HT I paid extra for on this i7.
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Will SDXC work with it? just I know it can be picky with SD cards as it is
 
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