Raspberry Pi - $35 Linux computer

  • Thread starter Thread starter daz
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If you are using a proper optimised release for XBMC (OpenELEC, RaspBMC, Xbian) then it should have an optimised skin already. While navigating menus is a little sluggish at times I would never deem the speed to be unacceptably slow.

One thing to not is that a lot of work is being done to improve performance in the next XBMC release (Gotham), and you can check out a video of the performance here:
http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/4986
 
I found the menus in raspbmc to be pretty sluggish almost to the point of being a problem when installed on an SD card... but much better and fluid with no problems at all on a USB stick...

And since switching to OpenELEC the menus have been absolutely perfect even when running from the SD card (not sure why, I guess OpenELEC may just be better optimised - I've had less problems with it overall too)
 
I use OpenELEC as well and as I said the menu speed is a little sluggish but more than acceptable. It's been a long time since I tried RaspBMC or Xbian but I would've expected them to be similar in performance.
 
Need some help chaps..

I'm trying to stream IP camera footage to the Pi and have no idea where to start. When googling most results are re motion detection etc which isnt needed.

Simply the streamed output full screen on the Pi. Imagine a camera at the front door which can be checked on the TV.

Any suggestions?
 
There is a new article on the RaspberryPi site about using the RPi as a security cam:
http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/5071

It's not what you want, but I'd keep an eye on development due to this line:
We’re currently working on integrating the live stream into MediaPortal server so that we can switch to a TV channel to see the live stream from the cam in our office.
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Dammit...

I bought the "Ultra HQ 2A 5V USB Power Supply" from modmypi, since it had plenty of good reviews and is designed specifically with the Pi in mind... Well I just got home and plugged it in and now my Pi appears to be broken :(

Get no response from it using either the new charger or the one I used previously... Pretty disappointing. I've emailed them explaining the situation so hopefully they might be willing to work something out...

Now I have to watch homeland via the Laptop Hdmi out and suffer the ridiculously crappy overscan :mad:
 
bledd. said:
I tested one for a weekend

Every video I threw at it played flawlessly, looked the same as my amd htpc output.

The slow menu's were a show stopper for me though. They took soo long to navigate through. I imagine this could be easily rectified with a skin made specifically for the Pi; they need one with smaller jpg preview pictures and no animations in the menus. I'm sure with these additions it would make it a far better experience for the end user.

That's my 2 cents on it.
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thx appreciate the reply back, I had a feeling the gpu assisted playback would really improve the performance and iq of hd playback but did not know for sure.

I am really surprised no mention of the cubieboard 2, 60 quid dual core 1ghz little kit, starting to feel I should not have returned mine so quickly :)

Maybe ill just get the cubieboard 3 :)
 
uncle_rufus said:
Dammit...

I bought the "Ultra HQ 2A 5V USB Power Supply" from modmypi, since it had plenty of good reviews and is designed specifically with the Pi in mind... Well I just got home and plugged it in and now my Pi appears to be broken :(

Get no response from it using either the new charger or the one I used previously... Pretty disappointing. I've emailed them explaining the situation so hopefully they might be willing to work something out...

Now I have to watch homeland via the Laptop Hdmi out and suffer the ridiculously crappy overscan :mad:
Click to expand...

Update - after a weekend of tinkering I've got the Pi working again, I don't think the ModMyPi PSU was to blame, it was just an unfortunate coincidence (or maybe blasting the Pi with a proper PSU caused a bit of a blip)... The SD card boot sector seemed to be screwed up, but after some careful manual formatting all is working again

The guys at ModMyPi were very helpful however, and were prepared to replace the PSU and the Pi if I hadn't managed to fix it, so a definite thumbs up for them here :D

I also seem to have (touch wood) finally got my playback issues sorted with a combination of the new PSU, OpenELEC 3.2.0, and some of the advancedsettings.xml tweaks from the OpenELEC wiki (from memory: cachemembuffersize=0, readbufferfactor=4.0, forcereadbuffer=1)

I tried to update to OpenELEC 3.2.2 and it refuses to work (if I update through the settings it works on reboot but then fails to boot after, and if I install it straight from the image it doesn't ever boot)... Does anybody have it working?
 
Super-Spy said:
Hi all,

I was hoping you could help me. I am running Raspbmc on my Pi. Occasionally I use it for streaming video from the internet.

I would like to run all these streams through a VPN for security purposes.

Can you tell me:

- How can I set up the Pi to run through a VPN. I can't seem to find any settings for this

- Can you recommend a reputable VPN that is fast ie won't slow down the streams ?

Thx
Click to expand...

Any help or advice with the above ?
 
Evilpaul said:
I use OpenELEC as well and as I said the menu speed is a little sluggish but more than acceptable. It's been a long time since I tried RaspBMC or Xbian but I would've expected them to be similar in performance.
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Is OpenELEC the better distro for XBMC at the moment? I was using Raspbmc a few months ago and found it a bit sluggish and stuttered on some tv shows.

I liked that I could use an app on my android phone to control it, I'm assuming it would work with this as well?

Figured I'd ask before I go wiping the SD card again.
 
Epoch said:
Is OpenELEC the better distro for XBMC at the moment?
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I've used OpenELEC exclusively for quite a while, so I couldn't say how RaspBMC or Xbian curerntly compare to it.

Epoch said:
I liked that I could use an app on my android phone to control it, I'm assuming it would work with this as well?
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They all run XBMC, so your remote control app will work exactly the same. (I prefer to use my TV remote through CEC over HDMI, personally.)

Epoch said:
Figured I'd ask before I go wiping the SD card again.
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If you've only got the one SD card then it might be worth investing in a second, it can be useful for testing or backup purposes.
 
Epoch said:
Is OpenELEC the better distro for XBMC at the moment? I was using Raspbmc a few months ago and found it a bit sluggish and stuttered on some tv shows.

I liked that I could use an app on my android phone to control it, I'm assuming it would work with this as well?

Figured I'd ask before I go wiping the SD card again.
Click to expand...

OpenELEC has been working great for me - I was using raspbmc for a while before but it kept screwing up (would turn it on oneday and randomly find the network interface refused to come up, and eventually would have no choice but to re-install to fix it)...

You can use Yatse or XBMC remote apps with OpenELEC, although on my install it wasn't enabled by default like it is on raspbmc (a quick trip to the settings with a keyboard plugged in soon activates it though)

For the best experience I recommend installing OpenELEC to a USB stick instead of the SD card, allowing you to hopefully set it to the Medium or High overclock settings... and then tweak the advancedsettings.xml to sort out the cache buffer
 
Auto video play back

What would the best OS for the pi be to do this? Also how would I go about it?

I's just a single video I want to loop over and over (for display purpose)

Video has audio
 
Evilpaul said:
They all run XBMC, so your remote control app will work exactly the same. (I prefer to use my TV remote through CEC over HDMI, personally.)


If you've only got the one SD card then it might be worth investing in a second, it can be useful for testing or backup purposes.
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That's good news. Yeah I suppose you have a point there. Will see if I can pick one up next time I'm out.

uncle_rufus said:
OpenELEC has been working great for me - I was using raspbmc for a while before but it kept screwing up...

You can use Yatse or XBMC remote apps with OpenELEC...

For the best experience I recommend installing OpenELEC to a USB stick instead of the SD card...
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Glad its not just me who had issues with it.

I think Yatse was the one I used before.

I had a look at using a USB stick, looks like theres a few guides out there on how to do that, so might give all this a bash over the weekend.

Thanks for the feedback guys.
 
Got a slightly weird XBMC/OpenELEC problem if anybody recognises it and might be able to help...

I've just changed my media server from a crappy Intel-Atom based one to a HP Microserver, as well as switching from Raspbmc to OpenELEC, and during the setup process I had added a few different sources to OpenELEC while I was testing things (namely, I added FreeNAS as a source while I was testing it on the HP, and it had a handful of TV show episodes on it, and then I also added my old server as a source which had a lot of stuff on it but I didn't let the library update I just played it direct from the "Files" option)...

Now the problem is I've added the unRAID setup I've finally setlled on as a source in OpenELEC for TV Shows (initially, will do Movies + Music etc later), but before I allow it to scan the library and scrape all the show info I wanted to first remove the references to episodes it still has for the old sources....

I selected the old source from the "Files" menu and bringing up the info menu then pressing "Remove Source" and answering "Yes" when it asked if I wanted to remove the files from that Source from the library... When I did this the Pi appeared to freeze for some time, at first I thought it was updating the database etc. and I would regain control once it finished, but half an hour later it was still sitting there (and we're talking about removing a pretty small number of entries, perhaps 30 or 40 TV episodes at the very most)

Eventually I had to SSH onto the Pi and since top showed very little CPU activity I figured it had just hung so I told it to power off and restarted it - the shows are all still there!!! I then tried just manually selecting one show and telling it to "Remove from library" and the exact same thing happens (freeze, reboot, still there)... What on earth is going on?

Does anyone know if there is a way to just nuke whatever information XBMC has and start over? (But preferably without erasing all the my preferences and settings - just the media database) I feel like you ought to just be able to delete the database file and XBMC will create a fresh one, but after a bit of Googling I can't make out whether that is the case
 
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