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."
Impressive hardware (Score:3, Interesting)
The big news is that the GPU on the Raspberry Pi doubles the performance the iPhone 4S -- on a board that costs a fraction of the iPhone. Now that's impressive.
Re:Impressive hardware (Score:4, Interesting)
And probably sucks up five times the power that the iphone GPU does. Amazing what you can do when you don't have to deal with trying to get 7 hours of run time out of a 5watt-hour battery.
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On a serious note the raspberry pi would last 3 hours on a 5 watthour battery at full power consumption. It was not optimised for low power, low cost was the bigger issue so it uses cheaper linear voltage regulators to drop the 5v input to the internal 3.3, 2.5 and 1.8v rails.
Re:Impressive hardware (Score:4, Interesting)
Back of the envelope calculations:
The iPhone 4 battery is 5.25 Whr at 3.7V. The Raspberry Pi draws 300mA peak. Let's be pessimistic and assume that's the constant draw for XBMC video decoding. At 5V, that's 1.5W, which will give about 3.5 hrs of battery life. I'd bet you'd actually see closer to 4 hours in real-life tests. SD or 720p video would probably see even lower power consumption.
So, how does the iPhone do? Real-world examinations of Apple's claim of "up to 10 hours" for playing video are hard to find. Apple's tests were done with a video from iTunes: 640×480 resolution, so this is hardly a fair comparison. PCWorld [pcworld.com] found the life to be about 6 hours for 720p video, but that includes the power from the display (at full brightness) and wifi. (The iPhone has had battery life issues because of an OS problem, just to complicate things a bit).
So, the Raspberry Pi compares pretty well. I would love to see someone make a fair test here: play an HD video over HDMI for both devices and measure the power consumption. The Raspberry Pi will draw more current, probably, but not nearly as much as you might think.
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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.
Re:Impressive hardware (Score:4, Interesting)
Is it the ability to display a UI, or the ability to decode H.264 at that resolution
For that matter, which H.264 profile? Is it just CBP (Constrained Baseline Profile) or BP? If it can decode the same H.264 my Windows box does, then it would be quite impressive, but I just don't see how that would be possible at this price and current generation hardware.
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High profile good enough for ya?
I am absolutely drooling over this thing.
Re:Impressive hardware (Score:4, Informative)
Argh, I must have messed up some HTML:
Specs [wikipedia.org]
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It's the same SoC that the Roku2 uses...it handles high profile.
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Considering that XBMC doesn't run on the iPhone, I assumed he was talking about video decoding. Given other posts in the thread, I'm not so sure anymore.
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Considering that XBMC doesn't run on the iPhone, I assumed he was talking about video decoding. Given other posts in the thread, I'm not so sure anymore.
You need to be jailbroken, but yes it does [xbmc.org].
Re:Impressive hardware (Score:5, Informative)
Forget teaching kids how to program; the $25 Raspberry Pi computer might just be the home entertainment STB and compact gaming console we’ve been waiting for. The low-cost computer – and its $35 sibling – should deliver double the graphical performance of the iPhone 4S, according to executive director (and Broadcom SoC architect) Eben Upton, telling Digital Foundry that not only does the BCM2835 GPU at the heart of the Raspberry Pi roast Apple’s latest smartphone, but it thoroughly whups NVIDIA’s Tegra 2.
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Don't forget the "phone" part of the iPhone :p
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It has a phone app now? Man, it really can do everything!
good idea, in theory... (Score:2)
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I could find a dozen GPUs that put the iPhone 4S to shame and are cheaper
You are missing the point. Can you find a dozen that are part of a fully functional computer that costs $25?
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.
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Let's put this another way:
There's a new kit car announced. It has a 100cc engine and a small frame attached to four wheels. This "car" gets 100mpg and costs $500. It has no seats, no steering wheel, no roof, no doors, no airbags, no windshield, etc.
Is it fair to compare this "car" in terms of fuel economy and price to a brand new Corolla or F150?
If someone starts going on about "It's a fraction of the cost and gets 4x the economy! That's the real story here!" Wouldn't you think they were a little nuts?
No I'd think they're freaking geniuses.
You screwed up the standard /. car analogy. Cross out the bit about the 4 wheels and no seat, and you've basically described a moped or motorcycle. Pretty exciting news, if that whole giant and exciting market had never existed until right now. This is like living in day 1 of the Harley Davidson corporation, or day 1 of Vespa. Thaaaats why they're geniuses, not because they invented yet another car model, but they're inventing entire new vehicular industry categori
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Let's put this another way:
There's a new kit car announced. It has a 100cc engine and a small frame attached to four wheels. This "car" gets 100mpg and costs $500. It has no seats, no steering wheel, no roof, no doors, no airbags, no windshield, etc.
Is it fair to compare this "car" in terms of fuel economy and price to a brand new Corolla or F150?
If someone starts going on about "It's a fraction of the cost and gets 4x the economy! That's the real story here!" Wouldn't you think they were a little nuts?
No I'd think they're freaking geniuses.
You screwed up the standard /. car analogy. Cross out the bit about the 4 wheels and no seat, and you've basically described a moped or motorcycle. Pretty exciting news, if that whole giant and exciting market had never existed until right now. This is like living in day 1 of the Harley Davidson corporation, or day 1 of Vespa. Thaaaats why they're geniuses, not because they invented yet another car model, but they're inventing entire new vehicular industry categories.
Right, so what I described is NOT a Harley or a Vespa, correct? You would have to add more thing to it, correct? It would also have to meet certain safety requirement which further drive up it's cost and drive down it's fuel economy. And you can see that I didn't compare it to a Harley or Vespa. I compared it to the standard 4 door family car and the standard truck. Are you saying that a Vespa really replace the standard car for a family of 4?
Are there businesses currently using iPhone 4Ss as embedded vid
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You seem to be one of the rare people who uses a truck as a truck. Most people with a truck/SUV never use it as anything but a passenger car. They wouldn't even think of doing anything that actually needs 4WD because that might nick the paintjob.
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You seem to be one of the rare people who uses a truck as a truck.
It's probably safe to assume that if a Slashdotter has a truck, it's a truck.
'96 Chevy K-1500 here - I plow snow, tow hay, and haul rock and cow shit with it.
Subaru Forester for the day job.
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Yeah the funniest for me is a brand new land rover with all the mod cons inside. NIce seats. Video and sound system. And a snorkel attached to the engine air intake so it can draw air from the level of the roof. A friend of mine has a picture of him doing to that in a real four wheel drive, but the interior is actually submersible, ie, no expensive electronics.
Toyota Matrix gets me most of the way there (Score:2)
I've got winter tires on my Matrix, haven't got stuck yet in the Canadian Prairies. It'll handle 8-foot lumber with the hatch closed, if I need sheet goods I get the store to rip them or else hook up a trailer. With the back seats down I've hauled (on separate occasions obviously) a dishwasher, a barbecue, 500lbs of bricks, three mountain bikes, a table and four chairs (not flatpacked), a hutch, and various other stuff. It's great.
For anything I can't put on the trailer behind it, I rent a cargo van.
Decoding (Score:3)
That is pretty cool. .mkv containers usually). .mov files and I don't know how much decoding is required for playing back those files. All I know is, .mov files tend to be really big. .mov beforehand?
I have a HTPC that does that for 10x the price. But even my box needs to use gpu hardware (an Ion2) to play back 720p h264 files fluently (those come in
This demo shows
So will the Raspberry be able to play common file formats, or will you have to encode everything in
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The Raspberry Pi's GPU has h264 decoding in it.
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Can the hardware really only manage 8-10 frames/sec. or is that their software?
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As I understand it that is the speed of the UI updating. The video, as you can clearly see, is running at full speed.
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"Clearly see" on a youtube video?
Maybe it's just me but I'd prefer a proper framerate displayed...
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x264 specs ain't everything (Score:4, Interesting)
like i said, performance/dollar this thing is still awesome, but you do still have to think of the whole package.
Re:x264 specs ain't everything (Score:5, Interesting)
while the specs for decoding video are AWESOME (especially for the price point), what I continually point out to people is that the low CPU can still kill you on some things. I have an NVIDIA ION / Atom D330 HTPC that can destroy the 40Mbps x264 killasample absolutely no problem, yet has trouble on some of the even medium-flashy skins for XBMC.
like i said, performance/dollar this thing is still awesome, but you do still have to think of the whole package.
It's mouthwatering .. waiting is the hard part.. I want one in my car, at my desk, at work, everywhere. Do you think they'll sell these as a six pack? :)
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I'm not sure I fully understand this yet:
You're willing to spend a few thousand on a big TV and sound system but the media player can only cost $25?
Somebody please explain it to me...
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It's not the price, it's what you can do with it ... ;)
Re:x264 specs ain't everything (Score:5, Funny)
Let me guess... you buy Monster cables?
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Audio equipment is pricey because of the analogue conversion that gets send to the speaker
Don't want to start an audiophile war but I hope you spent more on your speakers than on your amplifier.
Just saying...as somebody who's set up a lot of hifi systems.
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Have you tried it with XBMC Eden and dirty regions enabled? In advancedsettings.xml:
Another combination to try is:
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.
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The issue is licensing the patents from MPEG-LA. The cost of licensing a codec is too high to license them all for every Pi sold: the cost of licensing AAC alone is 4% of the total price of the board. So, either there will be a hardware version that comes with all the codecs (and costs a lot more), or there will a software codec pack that you can pay to download.
The problem is that the Raspberry Pi's relatively weak ARM-based CPU is almost certainly not powerful enough to decode high-bitrate 1080p VC-1 or
Video stutter (Score:2)
It stutters a bit when he plays the muppets. My linux box has trouble with 1080p video and IIRC it's quite a bit more powerful than a R-Pi. I'll be waiting to see some serious reviews before I look to use this as an HTPC.
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And not everything can just "sync" to what you want, even if it accepts the input stream. Especially if you're not dealing with a projector.
My LCD TV will take a whole bunch of sync rates but my DLP projector takes only a pretty narrow range.
BeagleBone already does this, and it's real (Score:2)
There are lots of little single-board computers at low price points. It's not just Arduno and Basic Stamp machines any more. The BeagleBone [beagleboard.org], at $89, is available now. Runs Linux on an ARM chip.
The Raspberry PI $25 price is vaporware until they ship in quantity. Remember OLPC. They never made their $100 price point.
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BeagleBone doesn't even come with any video-out connector as standard so probably not the best solution in this instance. More likely Beagleboard or Pandaboard for higher $.
Chinese New Year celebrations likely delaying Raspberry Pi ETA by a week or 2 I guess, but not long now....
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True but it's easy to interface a touch screen LCD to the Beagle Bone.
https://plus.google.com/u/0/104712705716996155416/posts
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ps47MOHF9x8
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Yeah...what size? And it needs a special adapter to hook to an HDMI monitor... Sorry...you're grasping at straws. Don't get me wrong, the BeagleBone's a GREAT device. So's the BeagleBoard and PandaBoard. All of them are way more expensive...and they're overkill for what's being done here and for that purpose.
They might work out for YOU, but they don't provide the stated purposes (Providing an inexpensive computer specifically intended to do comp-sci education with what's a very usable but almost utterl
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BeagleBone's how much more? Besides...the OLPC's problem was they aimed high. This beastie's down to roughly the pricepoint in question. Not for profit, remember. And...the devices are very much a first cousin to a device that retails for $99 or less for the mid-range and basic models- that plays back things like Hulu, Netflix, etc. BoM costs place the Roku2 series devices right down into the price-point of the R-Pi...and the only real differences are possibly a bit of POP RAM profile and a few diffe
Very cool (Score:2)
I love the Raspberry Pi project, and have my CC ready to order. However, this isn't that spectacular of a use for it :)
There are a ton of specialized boxes that already do it in a neat package with a proper remote. (personally I use a WD TV Live both 1st and 2nd gen).
To all those criticizing the performance, or codec support etc etc, remember this is just ONE of the many things this thing can do and it's just to show you the potential of what a $25/$35 general computing device can be made to do. The coolnes
no media center for me w/o tuner support (Score:2)
Well, it is impressive and very much an accomplishment, even if you consider other limitations already pointed out. But all I see is an implementation that might provide playback support. One very important thing for me in a media center is tuner support. So until there is support for a tuner for the Raspberry Pi, I'll still need to use a PC as a media center.
XBMC uses many tuners, but depends on their drivers being installed in the OS. I don't see that happening any time soon for the R Pi. I hope I'm wron
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XBMC uses many tuners, but depends on their drivers being installed in the OS. I don't see that happening any time soon for the R Pi. I hope I'm wrong about that, but until then this will not really serve as a media center.
It's not supposed to be a full media centre - it's a potential front end. I like the idea because I'm already running MythTv, and if this works it's $50 plus an extra screen I have lying around to put another TV in my kitchen.
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Try a network tuner like the hd homeruns. Make a lot more sense than a tuner in every device and is thus cheaper. A single mcard cable card can do 6 streams (the HD homeruns only do 3 per card for some reason).
If only I could get Netflix and Hulu on here (Score:2)
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I run OpenELEC, which is a very stripped version of XBMC based off of Linux.
Hulu (mostly) works for me. Every once in a while something will pop up and say there is an error with a stream, but not very often. It also works on Amazon Prime for me.
I don't have Netflix, but I'm assuming unless Netflix decides to release a generic Linux client the answer is "no".
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Yeah, you'd have to nab binaries off of a Roku2 somehow to accomplish the same thing...at which point, just use the Roku2...
Roku, Hulu, Really? (Score:2)
Re:Excellent (Score:5, Funny)
No, I'm just happy to see you.
XBox Media Center for Home Theater PCs (Score:2)
xbmc.org [wikipedia.org] is another open-source competitor to MythTV, Tivo, etc. Apparently was originally for XBoxes but has spread beyond that.
And it'll really only fit in your pocket if you're using a small memory stick instead of a hard drive...*
...
(*No, really, there were no double-entendres intended when I wrote that, but they just wrote themselves anyway.....)
Re:Excellent (Score:5, Insightful)
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HTPC in your pocket
For some strange definition of "pocket" - it's hardly USB-stick sized.
I'm not even sure it's smaller then existing HTPCs.
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Re:Excellent (Score:5, Informative)
No, it's credit card sized. How many times do you need to be told?
http://www.raspberrypi.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Picture-001-copy.jpg [raspberrypi.org]
(ignore the border - that's removed after manufacture).
Re:Excellent (Score:4, Informative)
Ummm, that's just the PCB. The finished Pi has connectors sticking out from all sides. Some of them are about 1cm long. Here's [pyrosoft.co.uk] picture proof.
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However, the SD card won't stick out that much on production boards. They had supplier issues for the first batch and used these as a workaround.
That said, you're right that only the PCB fits the "credit card" dimensions.
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It has an H.264 hardware decoder.
Codecs other than H.264 (Score:2)
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from what i've heard you're shit out of luck with anything hd if you're talking mpeg2 or xvid; which kills my dvb-s dream :-(
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Then the Raspberry Pi is not the ideal HTPC box for your needs?
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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The plus side being that Raspberry Pi costs only $25... If you already have an external drive with media on it, then it's a bargain.
My suspicion is that its power consumption will also be quite low, which is a big plus these days. Looks like it'd suit me fine, I'm not an intense media consumer, so high-performance HTPC isn't especially something that I need.
FWIW, I suspect a large part of doing this is just because you can. To demonstrate that you don't need the latest and greatest (read: most expensive)
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.
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You didn't necessarily just spend those thousands. Many households already have many of those things.
In my current situation for example, I have a desktop PC and an external hard drive of my own, and a TV in a communal area in the house. It's a big schlep moving my PC to within reach of the TV so I can plug an HDMI cable in. A $25 HTPC would suit me just fine.
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Not only does the RasPi's SOC handle Level 4.1 h.264, because it's running the eminently hackable XBMC you are likely to be able to play a much
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Do note that XBMC does NOT support ordered Chapters. I've asked for it but apparently ffmpeg needs to update to support it and they (ffmpeg) refuse for "security reasons"?! I want it so I can rip BD that have multiple cuts and create just one vid but cannot currently get XBMC to allow me to select "tracks". Likewise XBMC won't do MKV menus so far as I know - not that I know how to make them lol.
I happen to use XBMC on Atom\ION hardware. Under $300, full blown Linux installs, plays anything I throw at it (ma
simply (Score:3)
Reason I'm excited about Raspberry Pi, is that it's designed as a learning tool. I want to play, tinker, blah blah.
Reason I find XMBC on RP exciting, is that this is something I could 'theoretically' make. Now I know full well I don't stand a chance, but definitely provides some inspiration.
The really interesting thing, is that with the hardware price so low, it suddenly means you could make a physical product based upon their hardware, your software and sell it for a reasonable
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I can't find the post now, but I saw a post by an admin on the board that the GPU supports H.264 1080p30 HP encoding as well, but they aren't advertising it due to not exposing the interface or something, but they do have plans to do so in the future.
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Re:Excellent (Score:5, Informative)
Recording HD or even SD video can put a strain on a chip and the Raspberry was made to be low priced not high powered. But I have a feeling once you added all the stuff required to make it a fully functional HTPC you'd be better off just getting one the the AMD E-350s and calling it a day.
Recording HD or even SD video hardly puts any strain on a chip, since you would be foolish to record anything that didn't come pre-compressed, either from a digital tuner, or analog encoder. All the chip has to do is shuffle bits from the capture subsystem to the storage subsystem. The question then becomes one of whether the performance of a late-90s PC is sufficient for your metadata needs, running the database, processing guide data, performing scheduling decisions, post-recording analysis of the video, etc...
If you're actually looking for a fully functional HTPC, you're better off getting real hardware, and not some intentionally underpowered system. Electricity is cheap, modern chips idle very efficiently, and it's not like you can't just put the thing in standby or power it off if you're that concerned. Having some real meat behind your HTPC just opens up a bunch of new possibilities, and opportunity for expansion.
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The R-Pi is being made with a chip that's intended to be a head on a remote monitor (Hint: The same SoC is the one used in the Roku2 series set-tops...)- if you're trying to record, you're using the wrong device- and an AMD E-350's of debatable value unless you're using a hardware encoder (which then negates the need for the "higher performance" device...) you're going to probably want a much more powerful "gamer" desktop machine to do the transcode/encode work properly.
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lol, price, size, wow factor... keep in mind the cheapest thing on the link you provided is $100 more than the price of the pi... yes the nbox is cheap but no match neither in price nor in power
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That's the power input socket... taking advantage of the ready availability of walwarts and other adaptors that provide a ready supply over the USB socket input...
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Hint: In parts of the video you hear a tappy-tappy sound as he navigates around the media centre.
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Yes, Intel has traditionally been weak at producing good graphics processors, and even weaker at good drivers. This chip does a good job of the math in the GPU section.
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You do know that they're shipping the things with Debian? You have an X Server, and SSH out of the box, and if you'd rather set it up as a thin client using XDMCP to log in to another system, set up your login screen to do it.
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Blog / forum / area you'll be frequenting regarding this? Very VERY interested in helping test this out.
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http://www.raspberrypi.org/forum [raspberrypi.org]
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Did you notice that it's a 173MB preview?
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By playing a trailer available on Apple's site?
Mhmm.
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Not to mention that this wasn't intended for the same audience as OLPC was aiming for (Not that you couldn't manage to do that... An HDMI capable monitor worth messing with this device will only set someone back ~$99 retail plus the cost of an HDMI to DVI cable for about $20...) It was for providing a brutally inexpensive computer for teaching Computer Science to the "FIRST" world that could be priced as cheap or cheaper than the textbooks for the classes.
Not all things are immediately intended for "the t
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1080p30 H.264 AVC High Profile Level 4.1
Why? (Score:2)
The other major difference being the Roku device is designed to not be 'rooted' and Raspberry Pi explicitly is a 'do whatever the hell you want' project, with the latter being cheaper. Adding Wifi and a IR sensor to this is a relative cakewalk and will end up in all probability being cheaper than a Roku in addition to being more open.
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How is that better than renting a VM?