Raspberry Pi - $35 Linux computer

  • Thread starter Thread starter daz
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Having owned a Pi for nearly a year (!!!) I had been too lazy to do anything with it until just recently, but I now have the latest build of raspbmc setup and working, however I have one problem...

It connects to my server where it finds my TV episodes and movies and so on, but at the moment it seems to struggle to play things all the way through without stopping to buffer intermittently. It can play perfect for 10 or 20 mins and then suddenly hit a point where it buffers every 5 seconds until it eventually I have to stop it.

Has anyone got a feeling for what the most common cause of this might be? I've read various opinions searching around... prime suspect is my wireless connection (Pi is connected via wireless, server is wired, sharing through NFS), but then again the PS3 plays things from the server via Upnp over wireless without too many problems (other than the occasional dropped connection) and the laptop can also stream (over SMB) from the server with no problems at all.

Could it be that the Pi isn't providing enough power to the USB dongle for the wireless? Or is it possible that the buffering is not related to the network at all? (The CPU usage doesn't seem excessively high in top if I ssh into the Pi whilst it's playing something)
 
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Out of interest, which wireless adapter are you using? And which router do you have?

If it can hold ~10mb/s, it should be fine for streaming. But I do agree, wireless is pants!
 
I'm glad to hear that... unfortunately the best I'm going to be able to do is Powerline adapters (which just showed up actually, so I will try them tonight) which I hope will give a more stable connection - though not as fast as a proper wired connection would be. Fingers crossed!

Edit:
bledd. said:
Out of interest, which wireless adapter are you using? And which router do you have?

If it can hold ~10mb/s, it should be fine for streaming. But I do agree, wireless is pants!
Click to expand...

Router is a BT Homehub 2.0 (? - the curved one), and the adapter is by Netgear (can check the model later if needed, but it's a pretty decent one I had in my main PC prior to getting a wired connection for it)
 
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Update!

What a difference - the Powerline adapters have sorted it right out as far as I can tell, no more buffering :) I've only tested iPlayer/4od/itv/5player and a few TV episodes so far but they all appear to be better. I've yet to try a HD movie but I don't see any reason it won't also be fine (DTS issues aside). Has anyone managed to get the TVcatchup add-on to work? I installed it but it doesn't seem to appear in the menus...

I'm going to have to do a re-install this weekend anyway as now that I don't need the wireless dongle plugged in anymore it frees up a USB port so I can install to a stick instead - either that or I may try an NFS install (not sure which would have the better benefits)
 
What i want to do with the pi when it arrives if it is possible

usage to download Torrents and Nzbs

I want to be able to control it from abroad if i am away which i will be soon.

I wish to be able to transfer what i have downloaded to my main pc without having to use a portable hard drive.

so is what i want to do possible ?
 
Controlling from abroad:

Yes... you'll most likely have to get used to using ssh to control the Pi anyway, and to control it from abroad you just need to forward the appropriate port in your router to the Pi, allowing you to ssh in from outside your network... You'll also have to register with a DNS provider so that you can access your external IP via a domain name. There are some free providers out there so long as you don't mind having to "tag on" to an existing domain name shared with other users. You'd have to run a small script on the Pi or other machine on your network which periodically updates the DNS entry (usually with a wget call to the site)

Transfer:

Also yes... There are a few methods depending on if your main PC is linux or windows, linux is easy-peasy you can pretty much just copy it, Windows you could setup a Samba share (which will allow windows machines to see, drag + drop etc. files from a location on the Pi)
 
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chippy08 said:
What i want to do with the pi when it arrives if it is possible

usage to download Torrents and Nzbs

I want to be able to control it from abroad if i am away which i will be soon.

I wish to be able to transfer what i have downloaded to my main pc without having to use a portable hard drive.

so is what i want to do possible ?
Click to expand...

I did this for a while with mine, I found this guide to be very helpful Transmission Torrent Server it pretty much does the setup for you and with a few tweaks it should be able to meet all your goals
 
Have had my Raspberry PI now for around 6 months. They really are fantastic little bit's of kit :) Very good learning tool and highly useful.

So far I have used mine for:
- FTP Server
- Headless server
- Media streamer

My latest adventure was a web server. Mine is the older 256MB version so I don't expect it to serve many people, but it does work pretty well. For static HTML with a little java script it worked stable for all the time I had it up and running.

Also learnt a lot about linux, networking and web site development in the process :)
 
I'm gonna buy the Model B soon to use when i'm not using my work/ gaming rig. I'#m gonna buy one for my mother also so she can hook it up to her TV for Music, Films, Facebook and Minecraft!
 
Just got the Model B, amazing as I needed BBC iPlayer in my room and was going to get a second hand XBOX.

£32 1080p video playback / iplayer etc, using my Android phone as a remote. Great stuff, I'm using Xbian btw.
 
Got my model B the other week. Lovely little thing. Simply using mine as an Oscam card server for my distributed TV setup, its great dropping in to a command line environment though :-)
 
I bought my dad rasp pi so he could run xbmc.

Seems to work okay but only with the default skin. Try putting Aeon Nox on it and it really shows its limitations.
 
I have mine running Raspbmc from a usb drive.

Does anyone else experience a bit of lag loading the poster and fan art when browsing a movie library? I scroll through the library and it is ok for maybe 10 movies and then on the next one it will show the previous artwork for 5 seconds before "catching up" and loading the art.

I was interested to see if this is normal and a limitation of the hardware or if I might be able to fix it with a faster USB drive or something?

Thanks
 
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