Login at Kodi Home

dafras · 2013-05-28, 11:55

Hello,
I recently started toying with xbmc and I bought an ATV1 + a BCHD chip. I was wondering how the raspberry pi handles xbmc in comparison to a setup like mine? Can it handle streaming hd content as well?
Thanks

**ThY91** · 2013-05-28, 12:21

I recently grabbed a raspberry pi and have being testing it out, I have found it handles xbmc and 1080p content quite well, it does have some issues with DTS-HD audio if you aren't hooked up to something that you can pass the audio through too.

Running Confluence is quite smooth, it does take a little bit to load the movie library with 1800 movies but that is to be expected with what the hardware is.

I don't have an atv1 but I would assume this would easily outperform the raspberry pi.

~~Ned Scott~~ · 2013-05-28, 13:02

A Pi is not bad, not bad at all, but...

ATV1+Linux+BCHD has a much faster GUI and will handle more video codecs.

rikardo1979 · 2013-05-28, 16:04

(2013-05-28, 13:02)Ned Scott Wrote: A Pi is not bad, not bad at all, but...

ATV1+Linux+BCHD has a much faster GUI and will handle more video codecs.

doesnt the ATV1 out only 720p max?

Jmhthefirst · 2013-05-28, 16:23

No. ATV1/Linux is 1080p. I believe natively the ATV1 can only upscale to 1080p.

rikardo1979 · (This post was last modified: 2013-05-28, 20:58 by rikardo1979.)

OK, I have just realized than Ned mentioned the +BCHD Smile

so make sense now
But would like to see how much is the ATV1+BCHD compare to under £50 for RPi with all-in-package to run Wink

When I get hands on RPi my old couple £££ worth HTPC was switched OFF and few weeks ago I have sold it as the RPi serves all my Full HD needs Wink

mayoman · 2013-05-29, 19:22

The (very) odd HD audio stream aside, my Pi will handle just about everything I throw at it. However, it must be added that it has taken a lot of playing with builds and settings to get there Smile

**ThY91** · 2013-05-30, 13:06

@mayoman

Curious what builds and settings you have had to play with to get it right? I had openelec preinstalled and the only problem I have had is getting my wi-pi wireless adapter to work.

mayoman · 2013-05-30, 15:19

@ThY91
Leaving aside the minor stuff to do with the TV, and all the things I tried that didn't work...

I had two main problems - intermittent keyboard freezing & regular XBMC crashes when streaming (crashes related to full buffer & flaky internet combination I believe).
Problems worse with even "moderate" overclocking (arm_freq=800, core_freq=300). However overclocking arm_freq to 900 and leaving the core_freq alone at the default 250 eliminated the keyboard problem.
set gpu_mem=256, cachemembuffersize to 5242880 to eliminate stream/crash problem
Apart from fixing my issues, the above considerably improved both menu & streaming performance.
Am currently running the official Openelec 3.0.2 build
Would be interested to know if your pi had overclocking enabled "out of the box"? Part of my problem appears to be that I was unlucky enough to get a pi that would not tolerate any core overclocking.

backlund · 2013-05-31, 15:24

I have two tweaks I use on both of my Pi's that have massively sped up the library loading for me.

First, I offloaded the database to my home server where the actual movies are stored, and saw massive improvements in the initial library loading when clicking "Movies". The setup steps may seem a bit daunting for anyone who isn't a DB Admin, but they are pretty straightforward and it only takes a few minutes to get it working. Once you have the database set up, it's pretty much a set it and forget it affair. Just keep a copy of the advancedsettings.xml file somewhere off the Pi, so you can easily copy it back if you change OS's, etc.
http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=HOW...sing_MySQL

The other tweak I use gave me the greatest improvement of all. When you have XBMC set up and your library configured, you'll notice that the images such as cover art and backgrounds (fan art) may take quite a while to load as you scroll through each title. On a fast device such as a HTPC, this is generally unnoticeable due to the speed of the CPU and GPU, the network connection, etc. The Pi on the other hand is not a fast device in any of those regards. Each title's artwork gets cached one by one when you scroll or hover over the title. The fix for this is to run this python script (below). It will go out and pre-cache each title's artwork to the Pi. After running this script, I can scroll to any title in my library and the poster and fan art are displayed almost instantly. Ideally I should figure out how to run it automatically with cron or something, but I'm not a Linux guru so I haven't looked into it yet.
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=158373

*Note that I have a 512 Mb Pi, and the only overclocking I use is to set the CPU to 900 mhz (arm_freq=900).

**ThY91** · 2013-06-01, 12:43

@mayoman

Interesting, I will have to check out the core frequency to see if it was overclocked. It's unfortunate that you had those issues.

I finally got my wi-pi adapter working it ended up just being a signal issue.

tellytart · (This post was last modified: 2013-06-02, 16:49 by tellytart.)

I've only just bought my RPi (Model B), and am very impressed.

Vanilla install of Raspbmc, sharing of my library from NAS4Free over SMB, and a MySQL database running on the living room XBMC machine. (Gigabit network in the flat, but I know Pi is only 100Meg)

It is sluggish loading the art (thumbnails and art are also off-loaded to the NAS4Free server), but everything else is fine. It plays 1080i video with h.264 encoding with no stuttering at all, and all standard Rapsbmc speed (seems to be CPU overclocked to 800MHz).

It's got me hooked enough that I think I might get a second Pi, simply to act as a VPN endpoint, IPv6 gateway, DNS and DHCP for my network, as well as the SQL media database server.

For the living room however, I'd like to use a Pi, but can't - my amp can only handle SPDIF, so I couldn't get AC3 sound out of the Pi unless anyone knows of a compatible USB SPDIF output that supports AC3 and DTS passthrough?