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Comment by bananas | Hacker News Reader

I love the fact that a whole ecosystem has appeared around patching up the holes in the Pi's architecture[1]. Unfortunately by the time you've purchased them all, you probably could have bought a BeagleBoard instead.

[1] The built in codec and filtering is absolutely horrible making it pretty useless for audio applications.

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If you using it for HTPC then beagleboard is useless as it has no hardware based video decoding. That is why the Pi is so popular for HTPC's, built in H264 decoding hardware

The Beagleboard's probably a bad example in this case, but I've got a Cubieboard with hardware video decode and line-in/line-out that cost me less than the Pi + this board. (I believe it also has SPDIF on one of the pin headers. All of this was essentially free - the SoC it uses has built-in audio DAC/ADC, Ethernet controller, SATA, and a bunch of other neat stuff.) Plus a lot of early Pi purchasers won't be able to use this without buying another Pi, since the original version doesn't expose the I2S interface required by this.

I have a beaglebone black, but I can't get it to encode FullHD video in realtime. Am I missing something? or is there actually a justification for both the RasPi and the BeagleBone?

The raspi has a hardware video decoder for some codecs (e.g. H.264) whereas the bbb doesn't. Hence the bbb is not very practical for htpc setup.

usually when people do [1] or something like that it's to a link. to my ear the audio out of the pi's hdmi port is perfectly fine. i think the DAC used in the RCA jack is probably not very good. I would pay for a HDMI audio to DAC adapter rather than $33 for another soundcard that just works with the pi.

Are there any sub-$100 HDMI DACs that do 5.1 or 7.1? That would be amazingly useful if so.

yes, check ebay http://www.ebay.com/itm/AC3-HDMI-Dolby-HDCD-5-1-2-1-96KHz-24...

almost every HDMI decoder chip has 4x I2S outputs and just spits out digital audio

for example ADV7604

Cheap chinese HDMI-2-VGA adapters use chinese made hdmi receivers, those lack proper i2s outputs and provide only 2 channel SPDIF. example: http://www.taker.im/up/138624609420664378890.jpg http://lontiumsemi.com/English/ProductShow.asp?ProductId=4

usually when people do [1] or something like that it's to a link

Offtopic, but footnotes predate the web by quite some time. If only we had a easy way of formatting super/subscript...

No need for formatting; you can easily get superscripts and subscripts in plain text. See Unicode’s Superscripts and Subscripts Block¹.

――――――

¹ — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_subscripts_and_supersc...

Audio via HDMI is digital so there really are no problems there. The 3.5mm audio jack is just a simple PWM (see plots at http://www.crazy-audio.com/2013/11/quality-of-the-raspberry-...). Sound quality is actually quite improved upon the first release, but it's never going to be great.

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