2013-10-03, 17:16
Hey everyone, I'm a relatively new Raspberry Pi Model B owner and XBMC enthusiast. My day (and night) jobs are development based so I know the value of a good testing team (and from the looks of this forum it seems like you already have that). Anyway, I'm very impressed with the progress that I've seen in just the last several months and I'd like to see if I can be of any help. For development, I'm stronger with java/objective c (ios)/js/php/python, but have dabbled in a number of other languages (I'm still relatively new to *nix). For testing, you can throw anything at me. I have windows 7 (desktop), osx mountain lion (mbp), and (as of last night) ubuntu 13 (on the mbp) - (and also a centos 6 server, but it is busy and not available for dev/testing). Also I have 2 RPis B. When I originally got my Pi I loaded it with Xbian, but recently took notice of how far OpenELEC has come (and of how strong the dev comm is) and decided last night to load OpenELEC-RPi.arm-Rbej-Version-Gotham-Popcornmix-Branch(02.10.2013).tar (2013-10-02 16:38) onto one of my Pis (and thus why I put Ubuntu on my mbp).
Quick question: is this the version I should be testing or should I be trying the non-popcornmix version? What is the difference? -- I'd like to stick with gotham since it is on the bleeding edge, but are there any known caveats that I should be aware of compared to frodo? (I've scanned through this forum thread and a number of other locations, but feel free to post a link to these answers and tell me I haven't looked hard enough.)
Anywho - here is what I noticed in my brief testing last night:
Display: 1080p tv
SDCard: 8GB samsung class 4 (known for better random read write than most class 10s - it was faster on xbian than my class 10 extreme)
My Movies: I tested with a usb 3 external Passport that had about 20ish blurays on it. All mkvs, encoded using handbrake at a level 10 and placebo (extreme - I know). Only pulled highest quality audio from each and converted all audio to pcm using eac3to (my receiver is amazing but a little dated -- it won't play the new hd audios unless it is in pcm. -- I know pcm passthrough isn't integrated for the pi yet so I have my fingers crossed for when it happens.. I can live with the stereo downconvert right now). All movies ended up being in the neighborhood of 40GB.
UI: faster than Xbian - well done
Boot: faster than Xbian - well done
Startup Wizard: I really like this concept. Unfortunately, even though it listed the available Wifi connections, when I selected mine it just threw the popup "Connecting..." and never went anywhere. I hit Esc and tried again a few times to no avail. Eventually I just skipped it and had to setup the wifi connection from the settings menu (which worked first try).
Import of movies from usb hard drive - worked as expected. The download of metadata and fanart was slow, but not unexpected, even for only 20ish movies.
Scrolling through movie library (only about 20 blurays in mkv format) - fanart was a little slow to load (1-6 seconds). I'm likely going to setup a mysql db and move everything there to see if that helps.
Movie start time (usb) - holy crap well done. Miles better than xbian.
Movie chapter skip - again, verrrry well done. Miles better than xbian. Note: the seek was almost instantaneous, but it would play 1/4 second and then I guess buffer for another 5-6 seconds. Also xbian had a lot of white ghosting .. I never saw any of this on your build (well done!).
Problems:
I actually had some (what I can only guess to be) buffering problems, however the top notification would never appear to say it was buffering. It would last anywhere from a tiny fraction of a second to 1-2 seconds maybe about every 30 secs to a minute. This happened on multiple movies I tested and this did not happen with xbian when connected via usb (it did happen on xbian with smb... I didn't have time last night to test your build with smb). -- Is there a way to increase the buffer to see if that helps? Any other ideas?
---
Overall I am extremely impressed and want to give my appreciation and admiration to those who have contributed to take the build I tried to where it is today. Please let me know what I can do to help and also if you have any ideas as to my buffering issue.
Oh yeah, I had this issue too.
Quick question: is this the version I should be testing or should I be trying the non-popcornmix version? What is the difference? -- I'd like to stick with gotham since it is on the bleeding edge, but are there any known caveats that I should be aware of compared to frodo? (I've scanned through this forum thread and a number of other locations, but feel free to post a link to these answers and tell me I haven't looked hard enough.)
Anywho - here is what I noticed in my brief testing last night:
Display: 1080p tv
SDCard: 8GB samsung class 4 (known for better random read write than most class 10s - it was faster on xbian than my class 10 extreme)
My Movies: I tested with a usb 3 external Passport that had about 20ish blurays on it. All mkvs, encoded using handbrake at a level 10 and placebo (extreme - I know). Only pulled highest quality audio from each and converted all audio to pcm using eac3to (my receiver is amazing but a little dated -- it won't play the new hd audios unless it is in pcm. -- I know pcm passthrough isn't integrated for the pi yet so I have my fingers crossed for when it happens.. I can live with the stereo downconvert right now). All movies ended up being in the neighborhood of 40GB.
UI: faster than Xbian - well done
Boot: faster than Xbian - well done
Startup Wizard: I really like this concept. Unfortunately, even though it listed the available Wifi connections, when I selected mine it just threw the popup "Connecting..." and never went anywhere. I hit Esc and tried again a few times to no avail. Eventually I just skipped it and had to setup the wifi connection from the settings menu (which worked first try).
Import of movies from usb hard drive - worked as expected. The download of metadata and fanart was slow, but not unexpected, even for only 20ish movies.
Scrolling through movie library (only about 20 blurays in mkv format) - fanart was a little slow to load (1-6 seconds). I'm likely going to setup a mysql db and move everything there to see if that helps.
Movie start time (usb) - holy crap well done. Miles better than xbian.
Movie chapter skip - again, verrrry well done. Miles better than xbian. Note: the seek was almost instantaneous, but it would play 1/4 second and then I guess buffer for another 5-6 seconds. Also xbian had a lot of white ghosting .. I never saw any of this on your build (well done!).
Problems:
I actually had some (what I can only guess to be) buffering problems, however the top notification would never appear to say it was buffering. It would last anywhere from a tiny fraction of a second to 1-2 seconds maybe about every 30 secs to a minute. This happened on multiple movies I tested and this did not happen with xbian when connected via usb (it did happen on xbian with smb... I didn't have time last night to test your build with smb). -- Is there a way to increase the buffer to see if that helps? Any other ideas?
---
Overall I am extremely impressed and want to give my appreciation and admiration to those who have contributed to take the build I tried to where it is today. Please let me know what I can do to help and also if you have any ideas as to my buffering issue.
(2013-10-03, 16:56)mcarni Wrote:Quote:Updated Gotham Branch
- sync with Gotham Popcornmix branch (newclock3)
http://netlir.dk/rbej/builds/
http://lysin.me/rbej
maybe it was already noted but I cannot shutdwon anymore, it just keeps rebooting
M
Oh yeah, I had this issue too.
