[gpborges]

I can't wait to get my Raspberry Pi, and will give him this gift! The MPEG2 license! :-D

[slicemaster]

Wow, I am so glad they finally broke down and admitted they underestimated the community's desire for MPEG2... A good decision for them now, but a little late I feel, I would just assume buy my next ARM box from the likes of Pivos who has had the media center community in mind from the get go, not to mention that they have done a lot for the community here (being a sponsor and all). However, I will definitely be picking up the license for my current Pi and I don't think I'll have any qualms recommending the Pi as a low-cost alternative to the Pivos to friends who don't have a lot of cash to burn but were extremely impressed by the XBMC experience on my Pi.

Guess the comunity bitching finally got through to them

Cheers,

[Milhouse]

Wow, I am so glad they finally broke down and admitted they underestimated the community's desire for MPEG2...
...
...Pivos who has had the media center community in mind from the get go

I'm not sure they underestimated anything, apart from overwhelming sales, as the focus of the Raspberry Pi Foundation has never been on the media center market but always on education.

However if you want to use a Pi as a media center, you can now choose to lay out the extra £3.60 and take advantage of all the hardware acceleration. And if you just want to use the Pi for education (the purpose for which it was created) you don't have to pay for licences that you are not using. Best of both worlds, IMHO.

Anyone complaining about the lack of codec support in the Pi and the need to pay extra should, for the sake of equality, try complaining to Pivos about their lack of educational funding and schools curriculum packages, and see how far that gets them!

[prawnee]

Wow, I am so glad they finally broke down and admitted they underestimated the community's desire for MPEG2...
...
...Pivos who has had the media center community in mind from the get go

I'm not sure they underestimated anything, apart from overwhelming sales, as the focus of the Raspberry Pi Foundation has never been on the media center market but always on education.

However if you want to use a Pi as a media center, you can now choose to lay out the extra £3.60 and take advantage of all the hardware acceleration. And if you just want to use the Pi for education (the purpose for which it was created) you don't have to pay for licences that you are not using. Best of both worlds, IMHO.

Anyone complaining about the lack of codec support in the Pi and the need to pay extra should, for the sake of equality, try complaining to Pivos about their lack of educational funding and schools curriculum packages, and see how far that gets them!

Well said

[slicemaster]

I'm not sure they underestimated anything, apart from overwhelming sales, as the focus of the Raspberry Pi Foundation has never been on the media center market but always on education.

However if you want to use a Pi as a media center, you can now choose to lay out the extra £3.60 and take advantage of all the hardware acceleration. And if you just want to use the Pi for education (the purpose for which it was created) you don't have to pay for licences that you are not using. Best of both worlds, IMHO.

Anyone complaining about the lack of codec support in the Pi and the need to pay extra should, for the sake of equality, try complaining to Pivos about their lack of educational funding and schools curriculum packages, and see how far that gets them!

I don't think anyone here would argue that the Pi was designed for educational purposes, but you would certainly be a bit remiss if you assume that they didn't underestimate anything. My post was more or less a summary of their announcement, with a small amount of my own personal commentary.

"...Our initial expectation was that most of you would buy the Raspberry Pi for educational purposes, and that you wouldn’t mind that MPEG-2 wasn’t available. Our bad…Thing is, a bunch of you went and bought the Raspberry Pi in February and immediately started using it as your primary media center. And many, many of you have existing media libraries which are encoded using MPEG-2, and don’t fancy transcoding gigabytes of stuff to H.264. You’ve been complaining about that. Vociferously."

However with that said, I am glad they came up with a really nice licensing option for those that want additional codec support (I’m pretty sure this is what most the community that has been using the Pi as a media center has been asking for, a Paid upgrade option, and the best of both worlds as you put it). Quite frankly I don’t think it would be all bad if they cut all codec licensing costs from the base unit and just offered them in the store like they have for MPEG2 and VC-1, not a bad option to cut some additional costs for people that are truly only using the units for education.

As for your satiristic comments back on Pivos inferring, at least to some degree, that they would not be willing to support education, I would tend to disagree. Although they are without question in the business of selling units and making money, they have supported open-source development by sponsoring XBMC in addition to open-sourcing much of their own source tree.

In either case, I think this is a BIG win for both the XBMC and Raspberry Pi community… Media center users can pay for MPEG2 and VC-1 and be happy, and the Pi foundation will keep costs low for their education only base while appealing to a broader customer demographic.

What you said sums it up…. WIN WIN and best of both worlds for all involved.

Cheers,

P.S. Does anyone know if this is just a buy and go solution yet or does the player inside XBMC need updating to support the enhanced capabilities offered by the codec licensing?

EDIT: Answered my own question... it's buy and go! according to raspbmc's website...AWESOME

[pszab]

Hi
Can the rpi display all kinds of frequencies? 23.976, 29,97 and the integer ones?
Thanks

[slicemaster]

Hey everyone, I just put in my order for MPEG2 and VC-1 and am eagerly awaiting my licence numbers!

In either case, I'm very excited but I do have a couple of questions regarding the current state of XBMC for the Pi (and ARM in general). I've been using it now for about two weeks and it plays all my H.264 and Xvid content flawlessly! I love it, and I'm eager to give the MPEG2 stuff a spin when the time comes.

Anyways, I'm writing because I noticed a few posts regarding DVD-ISO support on the Pivos boxes, and I was wondering in the same limitation is true on the XBMC builds for the Pi. I was reading and the posts seem to infer that anything in an ISO file will not be hardware decoded for one reason or another, at least not yet. I was wondering if this little tidbit of information is true, and if so are there any plans to correct the issue in the long run? The reason I ask is all my DVD content is archived in ISO format and I'd really like to be able to play these natively(like i do on my other XBMC boxes), but if the video decode isn't hardware accelerated then there's no way it could work... I suppose one way to bypass this limitation, if indeed this limitation exists, would be to mount the ISO via SSH but that would be a pain in the a$$. One could also just extract the folders from the ISO but that would be a pain too. Anyways, I hope one of the devs might shine a little light on the subject, and maybe describe the architectural reasons why hardware accelerated video playback from within an ISO is not possible at the moment...if indeed that is the case...

Cheers,

[Ned Scott]

MPEG2 is what will allow DVD-ISO support (hardware decoding). Supposedly you can even hook a USB HDD up directly to the R-Pi and play DVDs from a disc.

[pumkinut]

Slicemaster, think of an ISO as a container similar to, but not the same as, an avi or an mkv. Both avi and mkv files just house (contain) video, audio, metadata, and subtitle files that need to be demultiplexed and played by their respective software. An ISO is just a bunch of files grouped together and structured according to a know standard. ISO support is baked into XBMC, but it's the video codec, e.g. MPEG2, MPEG4, VC-1, that actually gets decoded and played by XBMC. You could have an ISO that has all XVID or MP4 content, it doesn't have to be MPEG2.

DVDs are encoded as MPEG2 video files. An easy way of storing DVDs has been to rip the disk and then save it as an ISO. There are a couple of benefits. The first is that you only have one file to deal with if you're moving things around. The second is that you can burn that ISO to disk with a lot of standard writing software without having to fiddle with anything. ISOs can also be mounted by the OS and look like a physical disk. The ability to license MPEG2 hardware decoding on the RPi means that a lot of people that ripped their DVD collections to ISO files can now view them on the Pi without having to transcode them to a codec that the PI could hardware decode.

[slicemaster]

Thanks for the clarification Ned and pumkinut... I am quite familiar with the technical knowledge of DVD, ISO, MPEG2, etc etc. But like I said, I just wanted to make sure, what was being said over on the Pivos forums seemed a suspect...I wish I still had the links to the thread on the Pivos forum where people were talking about the fact that DVD content contained in an ISO was being software decoded rather than hardware decoded, I'd cross-link if I had it still it. However, your posts alleviate my concern and I can't wait to give it a go when I get my license keys... Not sure why some folks in the Pivos forums are saying that DVD-ISO is decoded in software, maybe they're mistaken or it might just be an issue on Pivos' Android or linux builds... Although that seems like a bit of a funny issue to have, esp since MPEG2 was supported from the get go on the Pivos boxes...

Cheers,

[j1nx]

Maybe they talked about the DVD menu's not being able to be decode on the hardware?

[davilla]

maybe you should believe what I say on Pivos forums about DVD/ISOs. I am, after all, an XBMC dev who knows what goes on inside XBMC quite well. DVD nav is a big issue with hw decode, very problematic, in fact even FFMpeg has issues which is why we use libmpeg2 for decode....

[slicemaster]

Maybe they talked about the DVD menu's not being able to be decode on the hardware?

Maybe, but I would even find that odd... Reason being is that the DVD menu's are basically very simple control overlays on either a static background (something that even the most basic computer should have no trouble with) or a MPEG2 encoded video (something that the hardware decoder should have no trouble with)...

But none the less, when I get my licence keys I'll report back if there are any issues with playing DVDs with menus...or DVD-ISO playback...

Cheers,

[pumkinut]

Have fun with that. When I rip my DVDs to ISO, I only grab the main movie, so the hardware decode of MPEG2 content is a godsend for me. Out of the hundreds of DVDs I own, I've never watched any of the extras. I find there's little point. This announcement by the RPi foundation means I don't have to transcode all of those ripped DVDs.

[slicemaster]

maybe you should believe what I say on Pivos forums about DVD/ISOs. I am, after all, an XBMC dev who knows what goes on inside XBMC quite well. DVD nav is a big issue with hw decode, very problematic, in fact even FFMpeg has issues which is why we use libmpeg2 for decode....

guess that answers it... Thanks