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Sucks the Pi3 is not supported. "current development is focused on RPi 4"... Yeah, the Pi3 is only like the most widely used embedded system on the planet and Pi4's are still incredibly hard to find. I would have focused on the 3 first. :/

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I don't think Pi3 had HEVC decoding, which makes it kinda suck vs. a Pi4, as a video-playing device. May as well use a 2, at that point. They'll both struggle with anything over SD-resolution in h.265.

My RPi 3B+ turned out to be fast enough to decode most any 1080p H.265 content in unaccelerated software on LE 9.2 without problems. Sure, at high bitrates you'll see more than 300% CPU consumed - but that's when having four cores in that tiny thing actually pays off for real :)

I found that too but being able to decode it 95% of the time was not useful because you have to redownload in another format if it turns out your RPI3 can't play a specific file.

I just avoided HEVC but I ultimately stopped using an RP3 as a TV because of audio timing issues that became apparent with Dolby Atmos. I now use a Odroid N2+, which I recommend.

I've played HD content on a RPi 3 for a few years without any issues. In fact I think it was running an earlier version of OpenELEC (not sure when they changed their name to LibreELEC -- or maybe that's a new project with the same goals?)

I'm pretty sure I've used a RPi 2 for HD content too but that did suck. The UI was a little laggy and I had to manually set NFS mounts because even SMB caused too much overhead. Once the stream started it played most content ok but god help you if you needed to fast forward or rewind.

> In fact I think it was running an earlier version of OpenELEC (not sure when they changed their name to LibreELEC -- or maybe that's a new project with the same goals?)

My exact question too. Anybody care to help us out?

They did not change names; LibreELEC was forked from OpenELEC over internal disputes in 2016 or so. Both projects live on independently.

OpenELEC’s last release was in 2017, it was a hard fork :).

A succesful one, i'd say.

LibreELEC is a fork IIRC.

I play 1080p and 720p H.265 all the time without issue on my 3 B+. It's just barely fast enough.

Huh, I stand corrected. The 2 was so bad at it that I didn't figure the spec bump on 3 would be enough to manage more than maybe tolerable 720p.

I play FullHD on my Pi 2B v. 1.2 (not 1.1) and it works very well, only with H.264, not 265 (but I don't really need it at the moment and don’t see it as something you really need, if don’t need 4K).

Pi2 has hardware h.264 decoding. I know about the h.265 thing because of my own effort at using one as a Kodi box, which hit a wall when several videos were unwatchable (turned out, because they were h.265).

> but I don't really need it at the moment and don’t see it as something you really need, if don’t need 4K

h.265 provides identical quality at smaller file size—much, much smaller file size, for some content (animation) but it's still a fair improvement for most other cases.

pi4 doesn't have vc-1 (or mpeg-2, but mpeg-2 is doable on the cpu). the Pi4 struggles with vc-1 bluray images. In practice, it should have enough cpu to handle vc-1, except for the fact that ffmpeg doesn't have a threaded decoder for vc-1 (long standing missing feature in ffmpeg, but no one with enough experience

It is supported, it's just not finished yet. Dev builds are available, or you can just keep running 9.2, which still works fine.

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