XBMC Running On Raspberry Pi 177
jones_supa writes "The Raspberry Pi Foundation has a news release about Raspberry Pi running XBMC smoothly, turning the board into a media center the size of deck of cards. Looking at Pi's low price, small size and hardware 1080p support, this could make an interesting HTPC project. Included is a video demonstration of the setup. For this to be possible, the XBMC team created a customized version that targets the beefier Raspberry Pi model."
Re:Impressive hardware (Score:3, Insightful)
What on earth are we talking about here? Is it the ability to display a UI, or the ability to decode H.264 at that resolution? They are very different things.
Audio and video format support? (Score:5, Insightful)
I know that the Raspberry Pi is specifically advertised as supporting hardware decoding of H.264 up to 1080p30 at up to 40 Mbps. What I want to know is if it also supports VC-1 and MPEG-2 decoding at the same resolutions and data rates. I know that the underlying SoC has this capability, but will it be blocked or omitted from the SDK for licensing/patent reasons? Any of these three codecs can be found on Blu-Rays, and transcoding the rips to H.264 would reduce the quality.
Also, what about bitstreaming the HD audio codecs (Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD MA) over HDMI 1.3? I know Raspberry Pi didn't want to pay for audio decoding licenses, but simply sending the raw bitstream to a receiver over the HDMI link shouldn't present any licensing issues (and is the best quality method to use anyway).
For the Raspberry Pi to be a good media streamer, it needs to be able to do these things.
Re:Excellent (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Impressive hardware (Score:4, Insightful)
How is he missing the point? The iPhone 4S is more expensive due to having many more features than the Pi (touchscreen, gps, cell radio, wifi, internal storage, more RAM, Bluetooth, wifi, built-in camera, etc.). Also it's GPU is constrained by power restrictions due to battery life. Comparing the two is dishonestdishonest and not analogous.
Also the only reason this can be sold art $25 is heavy subsidizing by Broadcom. Again making this a dishonest comparison.
Re:Excellent (Score:4, Insightful)
Because the storage devices are centralized, at least in my case with a media server in the basement.
The TVs and sound systems in each bedroom are NOT thousands of dollars. You can get 40" 1080p systems for around $300 now. Cheaper if you can deal with 720p.
Now, for under $50 (includes case, power supply, etc.) I can pop a box on the back of the TV to access everything I have centrally stored (400+ movies, 200+ TV episodes, 100+ short animations, 1,000+ music/audio) in each room. And if their Hulu and Amazon Prime plug-ins for XMBC work as well, get all that.