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Comment by macavity23 | Hacker News Reader

Do you have a source for this? All the reviews I have read claim that 1080p playback on the RPi is smooth.

It depends on the exact encoding parameters of the content. Certain container formats and decoder options decode better. Some content does playback fine but I have a large amount of higher bitrate content that doesn't play well.

Part of why I use XBMC is because it will play almost anything you throw at it. Sticking it on extremely resource constrained hardware gets rid of that feature.

with my pi/raspbmc the 1080p movie playback is indeed smooth but the menus stutter awfully. But the reason for that might be that the menus doesn't fully utilize the opengl es of the pi or something else (bad skin?) so I wouldn't blame the pi yet.

That seems to be a common issue with UI on the Pi... I think a few things are going to need to be rewritten to push work away from the CPU and onto the GPU.

Waiting with baited breath for mine to turn up! :-)

Nah, look at the history of XBMC (started on the Xbox), it's a nasty piece of work when rendering to the screen.

However, it was very naive of the grandparent poster to think that slow CPU powered menu screens means that the hardware accelerated video is lacking.

I never even mentioned the CPU speed. I didn't say the hardware decoding was lacking (which it is, since it can't decode most of my BluRay rips in real time) I said it made an awful HTPC, which it does because the UI FPS is awful and whether or not your content will actually play depends on a bunch of technical factors I can't be bothered to keep track of.

This is why I hope they will port Jelly Bean to it as well, so it doesn't stutter anymore.

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