Just finished building an awesome Raspberry Pi media center

Forums › Home Theatre (including HTPC and EPG Collector) › Just finished building an awesome Raspberry Pi media center - an interest?

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timmmay

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#684208 11-Sep-2012 08:01

I just ordered a Cubieboard from AliExpress. It's similar to the R Pi, but with a bit more power. The only downside is up to 30 days to ship, and I had to get the 512MB version as the 1GB version was out of stock, but that's still double the R Pi.

I'm considering the Motorola keyboard remote previously mentioned, or this combination air remote and wireless keyboard. Any thoughts? The Motorola would be better quality, but would a mouse be useful for android?

How do you even start programs with Android when you don't have a touch screen?

reven

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#684222 11-Sep-2012 09:04

does the Cubieboard support h/w decoding of the same codecs as the pi? can it be powered via usb? those are the 2 major selling points for me that the pi has.

but yes faster cpu would be really nice.

also would need a xbmc distro on it (would be really nice to run android on it and xbmc aswell, so could watch netflix on it)

timmmay

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#684245 11-Sep-2012 10:22

reven: does the Cubieboard support h/w decoding of the same codecs as the pi? can it be powered via usb? those are the 2 major selling points for me that the pi has.

but yes faster cpu would be really nice.

also would need a xbmc distro on it (would be really nice to run android on it and xbmc aswell, so could watch netflix on it)

Yes, it can decode quad 2160p apparently, I don't even know what that is. It's powered by USB. More info here.

It had 4GB flash built in for the OS, and an SD card slot. You can run Android ICS as well as more standard linux distributions.

I'll probably try to work out how to put linux on it so I can do XMBC... which I know nothing about really.

What I'm trying to achieve is:
- Replace the PS3 to stream TV and movies from my computer
- Skype (we have family overseas who are PC challenged but can use Skype ok)
- Web browser on the TV, with a small keyboard/mouse

xarqi

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#691369 25-Sep-2012 21:27

Well, I'm up and running.
One RPi acting as a NAS serving media files from about 10 TB of attached USB drives across my LAN to another RPi running Rasbmc, thence via my Onkyo 609 to my Panasonic 50V20 and my 3.0 speaker system.

I had a few false starts - tried openelec but gave up on it as it is too closed to tweak (in particular, I couldn't create mountpoints for my Samba shares with names matching those in my existing XBMC database from when my iMac was hosting the files, that is, I couldn't create a /Volumes/... directory as the boot volume is locked on openelec. I could have edited the database, but it is not well formed and paths are stored in many tables).

I had to install Samba on the Raspmc unit, and some HFS+ file system support on the NAS unit, and buy an MPEG-2 license key.

There are some small glitches and one bad flaw relating to audio playback. The glitches are that there is some screen overscan by default, and the correction factors are not permanently stored. There is a work-around as far as the interface is concerned, using the "zoom" option, but the video is then slightly clipped. CEC is a bit broken in RC4, but a fix is due in RC5 I believe.

The bad flaw in the audio side of things is that there is a glitch at the start of every track, and the first maybe 200 ms is missing, followed by a maybe 100 ms silence, then all is good. This is not an issue for movies, but it is a deal-breaker for use as a music centre, in my opinion. What's interesting is that the same fault exists in both Rasbmc and openelec, but an earlier version of openelec works fine. The problem there is that the bug that hits the audio was introduced before the support for the MPEG-2 key was, so you can have either working video, or working sound, but not both. I'm hopeful for a fix.

All up, after a few staggers and a bit of trickery (making the mount points for the shares match those for the iMac's local disks in the XBMC database), I'm pretty happy.

PANiCnz

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#691480 26-Sep-2012 07:31

timmmay:
reven: does the Cubieboard support h/w decoding of the same codecs as the pi? can it be powered via usb? those are the 2 major selling points for me that the pi has.

but yes faster cpu would be really nice.

also would need a xbmc distro on it (would be really nice to run android on it and xbmc aswell, so could watch netflix on it)

Yes, it can decode quad 2160p apparently, I don't even know what that is. It's powered by USB. More info here.

It had 4GB flash built in for the OS, and an SD card slot. You can run Android ICS as well as more standard linux distributions.

I'll probably try to work out how to put linux on it so I can do XMBC... which I know nothing about really.

What I'm trying to achieve is:
- Replace the PS3 to stream TV and movies from my computer
- Skype (we have family overseas who are PC challenged but can use Skype ok)
- Web browser on the TV, with a small keyboard/mouse

I think you'll be disappointed by the Cubieboard, in theory its a very nice piece of kit but I don't believe there is sufficient driver support in Linux for it to run XBMC. The Cubieboard uses the A10 SoC, there's a thread on the XBMC forums where the developer pretty much suggest it will never support XBMC.

lchiu7

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#691538 26-Sep-2012 09:26

@xarqi

Very impressive. At the moment I have lent my Pi to a friend since I really don't need one with two Popcorn Hours meeting all my media player needs.

But I did notice a couple off things with the Pi that made it not quite ready for me.

1. To be fair this could be network related but starting up a video to play (1080P DD or DTS audio) would take a long time before an image would show. This is on a 200Mbs powerline connection. The same video from the same server would startup much faster on the Popcorn.

2. Inability to play content with Dolby TrueHD or DTS HD MA audio. The Pi recognises it but it just won't play. This is probably something fixable in software.

I am using darkelec2.

Staying in Wellington. Check out my AirBnB in the Wellington CBD. https://www.airbnb.co.nz/h/wellycbd PM me and mention GZ to get a 15% discount and no AirBnB charges.

hads

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#701999 16-Oct-2012 11:55

reven: personally i would buy directly from pulse-eight.com, both mine arrived in about 4 working days using the cheapest shipping (around usd$8 i believe)

Any reason you recommend buying direct?

nicegear.co.nz - VoIP, DVB and other Linux compatible hardware

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timmmay

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#702023 16-Oct-2012 12:42

My Pi arrived in Wellington next day delivery from Australia from Element something.

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