2013-06-06, 00:07
My parents want to get a "little box that can play ANYTHING, including DVDs from all regions". Their current box is something that was the cheapest thing in the supermarket at the time, so it's pretty limited. Over the years they've started to want more.
I consulted some people (OK, one guy ) and he said that almost all of the all-in-one devices will have limitations, and to have true versatility I'll need a HTPC. His suggestion was to find a used laptop with a broken screen (cheaper that way) and use that. But then I found out about Raspberry PI which seems to be a much better choice all round - it's small, totally quiet, uses very little power, etc. And cheaper too, even new.
However now that I start looking deeper, I'm starting to get doubts about it's versatility after all. My original idea was to use VLC player on it, since it supports about every format under the sun, but that apparently doesn't have hardware acceleration support for Raspberry. This in turn makes it extremely sluggish.
XBMC however seems to use something else which DOES have the necessary hardware acceleration support (if I buy a codec licence for a couple of $, which is OK), but I cannot find anything about supported file formats. It does seem to use some of the same libraries that are used by VLC, so that's at least hopeful. Then again some other forum threads make me suspect that it doesn't have the DVD region-free code, which makes it pretty useless for me in that case. Unfortunately I cannot find any definite sources about this.
So - does anybody know how the file format support of XBMC compares to VLC, and whether it has the necessary code to play all region DVDs (independently of what the drive is set to)?
I consulted some people (OK, one guy ) and he said that almost all of the all-in-one devices will have limitations, and to have true versatility I'll need a HTPC. His suggestion was to find a used laptop with a broken screen (cheaper that way) and use that. But then I found out about Raspberry PI which seems to be a much better choice all round - it's small, totally quiet, uses very little power, etc. And cheaper too, even new.
However now that I start looking deeper, I'm starting to get doubts about it's versatility after all. My original idea was to use VLC player on it, since it supports about every format under the sun, but that apparently doesn't have hardware acceleration support for Raspberry. This in turn makes it extremely sluggish.
XBMC however seems to use something else which DOES have the necessary hardware acceleration support (if I buy a codec licence for a couple of $, which is OK), but I cannot find anything about supported file formats. It does seem to use some of the same libraries that are used by VLC, so that's at least hopeful. Then again some other forum threads make me suspect that it doesn't have the DVD region-free code, which makes it pretty useless for me in that case. Unfortunately I cannot find any definite sources about this.
So - does anybody know how the file format support of XBMC compares to VLC, and whether it has the necessary code to play all region DVDs (independently of what the drive is set to)?