Raspberry Pi runs XBMC; reliably decodes 1080p (January) | Hacker News Reader

Raspberry Pi runs XBMC; reliably decodes 1080p (January)

hackaday.com

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Since this item was posted in hackaday(January) a lot have been done. There is at least one[0] dedicated distro for running XBMC on the Pi.

When I tested it(about a month and a half ago, not with the latest version), it's wasn't a pleasant experience. Video did run smoothly, but menus where painfully slow. (I've used a slow SD card which might caused some of the problems - I ought to try again with a better one)

[0] http://www.raspbmc.com/

Try OpenELEC and XBian. They're much much smoother at the menu (over 60fps at 1080p when you disable the RSS ticker on OpenELEC). It helps if you overclock the already overclocked Xbian too. I have mine set on around 920MHz (no change in voltage though) and have it running all day for about half a month now. Seems to be working fine.

I can vouch for OpenELEC. What do you mean by "already overclocked"? Does XBian overclock your pi?

Yes, in fact it looks like they accidentally voided some people's warranties. http://xbian.org/2012/10/08/a-warning-about-overclocking/

I see, thank you. Does anyone have an opinion on XBian vs OpenELEC? I use the latter and it's fine, but if the former has overclocking, I should switch to that.

Recent firmware has been changed to allow you to overclock your Pi http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/2008

Raspbmc stuttered every few seconds when playing 1080p video when I last tried it (a month or two ago). OpenELEC, however, has performed fantastically; occasionally lags a touch on some menus and with some recent builds the cover art appears to be.. erm.. blocky, but for actual playback it's great.

I have experienced the same, but after updating raspbmc to RC5 it runs just fine.

I recommend installing the refocus skin (sadly it's not in the repo but you can grab it here: http://xbmc-focus.googlecode.com/files/skin.refocus.release-... and install via USB), it gives me around 10 extra FPS over the stock Confluence skin. Have you overclocked yet? If you run at 900MHz, i swear it feels like a whole new device. You will need to mount your /flash partition as rw though (mount -o remount,rw /flash), because it's set as read-only normally.

This is well known. This "news" is very old. http://www.broadcom.com/products/BCM2835

"... This is well known. This "news" is very old ..."

Old? How long has RaspberryPi been released, this year? It's one thing to have a chip that will do this, quite another to have the chip on a usable system that you can program for $35 setup.

Either way, it's not old news for me. That's why I posted it.

The article is from January. Even if you're amazed by it, you could have at least found an article about results (this is from before the Raspberry Pi was released).

"... Even if you're amazed by it, you could have at least found an article about results ..."

Not sure what you mean about 'results'? Could you find one for me and post it?

"... Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading ... Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. ..." ~ http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

(so is this a moderator post commenting back? - notice a title change & this comment on a new account. If so, moderator, stop being so snarky)

For those interested, it can do hardware MPEG2 (and VC-1) decoding as well, you just have to pony up a few bucks for

the MPEG-2 license - http://www.raspberrypi.com/mpeg-2-license-key/

or the VC-1 license - http://www.raspberrypi.com/vc-1-license-key/

FWIW, I'm running Raspbmc RC5 and am able to watch 1080i MPEG2 (recorded HDTV streams) and 1080p H264 streamed over my local network. Sometimes audio decoding causes issues (I don't have it hooked up to a receiver) like strange audio glitches.

CPU usage does stay high while using XBMC menus, but it seems responsive enough.

1080p of WHAT. Probably H264 but what profile? Baseline? Main? High?

Any - I've had it play 1080p of H264 MKV video over the network

It supports High profile, but not Hi10 (10-bit) files. http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=1...

Why are all these old shitty stories making the front page the last couple days?

Please take repost complaints back to reddit, thanks.

It does have some problems with decoding DTS content (I don't have a receiver) though. I've tried a couple of things already like overclocks and re encoding the audio but I'm still trying to find the sweet spot. This is all on RC5 raspbmc, still have to try openelec.

This is old news, from January this year.

What is the Pi's Flash performance like? For my uses, 1080p video is all well and good, but most of the internet TV I watch uses a flash player backend, which is something I ran into quite hard when trying to build a low powered Atom media center box.. it can barely keep up and desyncs like crazy.

Flash is pretty much non existent on the Pi. The XBMC based distros can supposedly do some flash but it's pretty wonky and the other distros like Arch Linux and Raspbian don't have it at all.

This will be even worse, as it's ARM rather than x86. I'd be shocked if there is even a Flash plugin for ARM/Linux.

Unfortunately the current distros are not very stable. I get a complete system lockup once every hour on the RasPi.

You may be victim of the "usb fuse" issue. I soldered some 1ohm resisters across the usb fuses that are present and my lockups went away (except when I try to do 2 things at once, hit swap and thrash)

What's the problem, and how does your solution work?

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