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XBMC on Raspberry Pi - Wonder if this will work out? (Historical Discussion Thread) - Printable Version

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- vikjon0 - 2012-01-31

Except CEC and casing what are you considering to add?

I am thinking more USB and WIFI.
It would be nice to include more USB in the case. Assuming USB wifi, disk, remote (non CEC).
In a custom case you could put a mountable USB hub but a standard case will need a standard mb USB contact(?).
But perhaps that is for version "C"? Holes for mounting in case and contacts for front panel? Or perhaps the fans will bring on the old soldering iron?

EDIT: Looks like this will make it possible to use a standard front panel http://frontx.com/cpx508.html


- Milhouse - 2012-01-31

vinistois Wrote:that's almost ridiculous. All users will need is a TV, a pi, a usb cable, and hdmi cable.

Cheapest XBMC hardware by a looooong shot

And the addition of an ethernet cable may also mean it continues to fit into the USB power envelope (500ma).


- Milhouse - 2012-01-31

vikjon0 Wrote:Except CEC and casing what are you considering to add?

I am thinking more USB and WIFI.
It would be nice to include more USB in the case. Assuming USB wifi, disk, remote (non CEC).
In a custom case you could put a mountable USB hub but a standard case will need a standard mb USB contact(?).
But perhaps that is for version "C"? Holes for mounting in case and contacts for front panel? Or perhaps the fans will bring on the old soldering iron?

EDIT: Looks like this will make it possible to use a standard front panel http://frontx.com/cpx508.html

It shouldn't be beyond the whit of man for someone to create a Raspberry Pi case that includes a stripped down USB hub circuit board inside - connect one port of the hub to the microUSB power input on the (user provided) R-Pi using a captive flying lead, uplink a second hub port to one of the USB sockets on the R-Pi using a second captive flying lead, and provide access to the remaining five USB ports on the top or side of the case along with the hub power input socket. Job done - one wall wart to power both the hub and the R-Pi, now with 5 fully powered USB ports. If the case/hub designer is smart [s]he'd make them all high current 1A ports. Smile

Such a case wouldn't be much bigger than the R-Pi mainboard - maybe an inch or two at most, and there would be no need for a "Model C" (adding more USB headers to the R-Pi will increase overall power consumption as it would be necessary for the R-Pi to provide power to each of those USB ports - better to do this with a separate hub, keeping R-Pi USB ports to a minimum)


- Starstream - 2012-01-31

NavySealsGuy Wrote:I figured we would just use openelec.

Actually on the topic Openelec it doesn't have an Arm version but it is in development it seems, there is something similar to Openelec called Geexbox and they already run on various Arm boards so hopefully both in the long run will support the Raspberry Pi.


- vikjon0 - 2012-01-31

Quote:Where did you see that?

Quote:I figured we would just use openelec.

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=121499

Not sure what distro if any it is based on or its relation to openElec.


- Oddsodz - 2012-01-31

htpc guy Wrote:Wow. You said it. Lazy sums it up. 2 seconds of Google Foo will give you the answer.

And it took you 5 seconds to reply with a funny but not informative answer. A "Yes" or "No" would have done. Laugh

As for using google to find if the R-Pi can run 1080P video. Well I have not seen the info I asked for. And that is, Would the R-Pi be able to play a 1080P Blu-Ray rip .MKV file? This also means that it would have the DTS-HDMA or DD-THD sound at 5.1 or 6.1 (like Star Wars) or (as some of my movies have DTS-HDMA) 7.1 surround sound.

When it comes to this neat bit of kit. I Am hearing/reading how great it is. But nobody is giving simple answers. It's all Tecno babble numbers and stuff.

so as my Google foo is poor. Help a noob out Big Grin


- Milhouse - 2012-01-31

XBMC doesn't support HD audio no matter what the platform - until the AudioEngine update is released, XBMC will extract core audio only.

Whether R-Pi will support MKV, Blu-Ray, DD/DTS (and eventually, HD audio) remains to be seen as that information hasn't been announced - we're waiting on Eben (one of the Foundation founders) to post a blog article detailing what codecs (video and hopefully audio) will be supported. The only confirmed video codec is h264, beyond that is anyones guess.

EDIT: Maybe not the post we were expecting from Eben, but this post just appeared which may give some detail/background on codecs.


- Pad_ - 2012-01-31

We are all making a fuss about HD videos and we already know that they are supported. But what about normal XviD videos? In their latest blog post, it is said that they will not be accelerated.

http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/592


- Oddsodz - 2012-01-31

MilhouseVH Wrote:XBMC doesn't support HD audio no matter what the platform - until the AudioEngine update is released, XBMC will extract core audio only..

Really? Seems odd that my Star Wars movies play in full 6.1 And my Transformers and some of my Disney movies that are 7.1 render sound to all my of my 7.1 analog speakers system from my X-fi titanium card. This is new as it did not before Eden.

But as the R-Pi is HDMI. If you was to have a Digital AV receiver with HDMI. Then I have a feeling that you would get DTS-HDMA as the decoding for that is done there and not with in XBMC. I My be very VERY wrong on this. I Don't have a Digital AV receiver to test No


- Milhouse - 2012-01-31

From the comments in the aforementioned blog post:

Quote:Limoto on January 31, 2012 at 2:18 pm said:
You say that MPEG4 and H.264 will be supported. In fact, H.264 is MPEG4 Part 10. So what do you mean by MPEG4? Is it Part 2?

Also you say that there are only these two at this stage. Is it going to be possible to somehow upgrade the existing device? Is it just software thing?

JamesH on January 31, 2012 at 2:39 pm said:
Yes, it's just a software thing. Hopefully more codecs wwill be added at a later date. There may even be a pay for licecned codecs option – see Liz's post below.

I've quoted the two Codecs as often they are regarded as separate by the end user who have filenames like fred.mp4, or barney.h264, but you are correct, H264 is an MPEG4 part 10, MPEG4 is part 2 (H263)

and

Quote:cnxsoft on January 31, 2012 at 2:24 pm said:

Would it be possible to purchase extra codecs separately ? Like having a firmware update. I've seen it on some tablets (Archos), the device is shipped with some default codecs, and if you want others you need to purchase codecs separately.

liz on January 31, 2012 at 2:26 pm said:

This is an option we're looking at exploring. If we do decide to go down that road, it won't be for a few months; administratively, it's hard to manage, we'd need to see a clear benefit for the charity, and it'll require another round of talking to the MPEG LA (and another round of form filling; the back and forth took about a month last time).

So there you have it - H264 and MPEG4 part 2 only for now, with the possibility of more hardware accelerated codecs in the future at additional cost.

It seems the R-Pi could fall short in terms of supporting all of the codecs one normally expects from XBMC, but maybe the situation will improve with time (and money).


- Milhouse - 2012-01-31

Oddsodz Wrote:Really? Seems odd that my Star Wars movies play in full 6.1 And my Transformers and some of my Disney movies that are 7.1 render sound to all my of my 7.1 analog speakers system from my X-fi titanium card. This is new as it did not before Eden.

But as the R-Pi is HDMI. If you was to have a Digital AV receiver with HDMI. Then I have a feeling that you would get DTS-HDMA as the decoding for that is done there and not with in XBMC. I My be very VERY wrong on this. I Don't have a Digital AV receiver to test No

There are ways and means to get XBMC to handle HD audio, but an out of the box and unmodified install of XBMC doesn't yet support HD audio (DTS HD-MA DD TrueHD). As such, I doubt the R-Pi build of XBMC will either.


- Pad_ - 2012-01-31

davilla, I don't know if you are permitted to answer this but, can the Raspberry Pi handle XBMC and XviD with no problems since there are no acceleration for it?


Audio - lehite - 2012-01-31

This may be of interest to some of you out there (from the aforementioned blog post):

Quote:Paul on January 31, 2012 at 3:57 pm said:
How about on the pure audio side of things? FLAC, Vorbis and Speex should be no problem. Isn’t the MP3 decoder free as well?

JamesH on January 31, 2012 at 4:06 pm said:
Audio is all done on the Arm, so whatever codecs you can get your hands on.



- onereader - 2012-01-31

The post was amended, the mention of Xvid as not hw-accelerated was a misunderstanding. The new version of the post says only that MPEG-2 and VC-1 aren't supported in hardware.

Dom (I understand that he is a member of the foundation or an engineer working on the board) clarified it in a post in the forum:

Quote:[Xvid/DivX] follow the mpeg4 standard and our mpeg4 decoder will play these happily.

Quote:Xvid is not a codec, but an implmentation of mpeg4 part2, and we support it.

http://www.raspberrypi.org/forum/general-discussion/new-blog-post-from-jamesh-on-the-main-page

Too bad MPEG-2 isn't accelerated, on-the-air tv here switched to DVB-T a year ago so playing directly my TS recordings would have been nice, but I can live with XviD and H264, 99% of my video files use one or the other.


- voochi - 2012-02-01

Limited HW acceleration is to be expected. It is just an affordable and fun project, not something that was intended to be a HTPC from the design stage.

MPEG-2 can be done in software, at least for standard-def (ie DVD folders and remuxes). Software decode of 1080i broadcasts....probably not.

HD audio is irrelevant, nobody will be buying this as a main HTPC for a high-end setup. I see people going wah wah I love HD audio in many posts, and then you see their setup, some basic $200 all-in-one sound system with plastic speakers Laugh

Nobody can tell the difference between DTS core 1500kbps and DTS-HD on such setups, blind tests confirm this.