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The price does not seem out of line. The interface of XBMC on the RBP-B+ is sluggish compared to other devices, but they almost all cost at least twice as much. I have mine overclocked at the medium level. It's pretty rock solid. Once it starts streaming, you can't tell much difference. I have ran mine both wirelessly and wired. Wired is certainly better, but not an absolute MUST have. Once you have it configured to your liking, I recommend you make an image copy of the SD card. I have heard of them corrupting the SD card but so far, mine never has. I have had mine for about 7 months. You may also need a remote control device for it. One of my TV's remotes works as a CEC remote but another one does not. I was able to pickup a Logitech Unifying USB dongle and make use of my old Logitech Revue keyboard to control that one. I am using openelec. I have 3 SD cards with different RBPi boots. If I want to do something besides XBMC/Kodi, all I do is pop out that SD and pop in another.
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Well, getting Android devices to properly change their refresh rates or passthrough DTS and AC3 seems to be difficult sometimes.
So, with that said, also the RPi hasn't the most horsepower, it definitly has a VERY capable and for sure a well understood and open-sourced gfx-chip which should in most places (like simply watching your stuff) give you a really (!) nice experience.
As I mentioned before, when watching my media sometimes it's hard to believe that I'm currently watching it through my RPi - because my 'grown-up HTPC' in my living room does perform better concerning Kodi's interface, but when it comes to simply play stuff: *pff x86*...
Bye,
Fry
Kodi v17.6 with shared MariaDB v10.3 | HTS Tvheadend 4.2.6 on RPi2 | running on:
Windows 10x64 | Nvidia Shield | FireTV4k | FireTVStick4 | Android 5 | RPi3 with OSMC
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noggin
Posting Freak
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2015-01-13, 12:29
(This post was last modified: 2015-01-13, 12:31 by noggin.)
If you are in the UK then the Pi has quite a few advantages, which could offset the reduced processing power (particularly on a non-overclocked Pi)
The Pi has the following benefits over many Android boxes :
* Dynamic Frame Rate switching on the fly. UK TV and DVDs are 25/50Hz, Blu-ray and other movies are 23.976/24Hz, and US content can also be 29.97/59.94Hz. Most Android boxes run at a fixed frame rate which you have to alter from somewhere buried in the system settings outside Kodi, and not all allow all refresh rates. If you don't watch content at its native frame rate you get stutter/judder. If you are in the US and happy with the 3:2 pulldown and don't watch non-US content then this isn't an issue. If you don't like 3:2 and/or watch European content it's a major issue.
* De-interlacing. If you watch Live/Recorded TV or DVDs/Blu-rays which are interlaced, de-interlacing is really important to avoid motion judder and break-up into lines (aka combing). The Pi has a reasonable de-interlacing algorithm implemented, but AIUI most Android implementations don't.
* Audio. The Pi will dynamically switch between 44.1/48kHz audio over HDMI (so you can listen to CD content at its native sample rate, and video content at its native sampling rate, without the quality loss that resampling would introduced) The Pi implements DD/DTS pass through in a totally painless manner, and also has no problems coping with 96/192kHz audio or multichannel PCM (so you can listen to lossless 5.1 content)
* CEC. The Pi implements CEC which allows a TV remote control to control the Pi over HDMI, meaning no need to buy or use a separate remote control for basic Kodi functionality (assuming your TV has the right support)
Of course Android platforms give you access to DRMed services like Netflix etc., and include functionality not present on the standard Pi builds like OpenElec and Raspbmc (like decent web browsing, games etc.) but in AV quality terms, the Pi (with the MPEG2 and VC-1 licences installed if needed) is likely to be a better bet than current Android boxes, though as Android 5.0 rolls out Kodi may be able to take advantage of new functionality to catch up on the platform (refresh rate switching may appear in Android 5 for example)
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Do wireless dongles work plug and play? Or do you have to manually set them up installing drivers etc...?
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Bump
Still looking for a plug n play WiFi dongle that works without needing any drivers installing etc...
To use with raspbmc.
Thanks
