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DTS can be hardware decoded on the Pi, but as mentioned before, this is not enabled yet due to licensing issues.
While it is true that a lot of Android powered devices will be very attractive alternatives to the Pi, remember that any of them that even come close to the Pi's price point often lack in certain key features and quality. When the Model A comes out then there will be a $25 Pi, making it even more attractive. There's also something to be said about a device made in this bulk, with this high of quality, with such an aim in the hacking community. The things that will be developed for the Pi will often be a nicer trade off than raw specs. For example, being able to connect a raw $2 IR sensor to the Pi's GPIO pins and be able to use an IR remote.
Good write up, though.
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2013-01-18, 19:12
(This post was last modified: 2013-01-18, 19:13 by Vertigo.)
After some more testing RaspBMC, Im going back to Openelec.
Yes, RaspBMC is a bit smoother and faster, and it does look better with fullsize fanart, but that doesnt excuse its reboots and various minor issues. I kept bumping in to; its just not stable enough for me. Openelec has been rocksolid so far, and once installed on a external drive, fast enough for me. I trust they will fix the fanart resolution before coming out of beta, and I can live with the upscaled 720p GUI which does look blurry on my PC monitor, but for some reason, it looks pretty good on my TV.
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Thanx for that write up... it was a good read.
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So how does the RPi work with the new PVR feature? I have a MythTV backend and have so far been running xbmc and mythfrontend and alternating depending on what i wanted to watch, now with the new PVR functionality i have a combined solution that works great but before i would go spending money on a RPi no matter how cheap it is it would be nice to know how well the PVR addons work with this thing, because the stuff coming from MythTV unlike recoded stuff is basicly "raw" from what i understand so the 1080i streams are much heavier than the x264 stuff you normaly would watch with XBMC.
can anyone shed some light on this? am i making a poor assumption when i think streaming HDTV is much heavier than streaming a Bluray rip?
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Good write up.
My experience with the PI:
I've only had my PI 5 days now and it is serving what I bought it for well!! I wanted a XBMC setup for my bedroom and with the PI price point it for sure fits the bill! I'm running Xbian on mine and have it OC'd to 900 mhz. Navigation is smooth considering the hardware and I can playback 1080p Bluray's perfect via NFS from a DNS-320 NAS and SMB share from my main Win 7 PC. Paired with xbmcremote app on my iphone and audio and video airplay its pretty much perfect. True DTS will fail everytime, but I found a solution for that since several of my Bluray's only have DTS tracks. Download a program called "Popcorn MKV Audioconverter" It will extract the DTS audio track from a MKV container, convert it to AC3 Dolby Digital, and reinsert the track to the MKV container. This was perfect because I didn't want to get rid of the DTS track since my main XBMC box is DTS capable. You can also set it to get rid of the DTS track and just reinsert the AC3 Dolby Digital track if you want. I've watched 3 full 1080p Blurays on it now with the AC3 track and it was flawless!
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scOOtt
Junior Member
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Raspberry Pi is a very nice hardware to choose for running XBMC. The only lack is that the hardware do not have an optical audio output. If it does it will be perfect choice for me.
OFF Topic: How you can add a reputation point here - I do not see this option anywhere.
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Popcorn MKV converter is painfully slow, at least running under wine.
For linux users, I found this works just as well, and like 50x faster:
avconv -i inputfile.mkv -vcodec copy -acodec ac3 -ab 640k outpufile.mkv
Feel free to change the bitrate to whatever suits you.