Raspberry Pi: yeah we're pretty much all on desktops again

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Raspberry Pi: yeah we're pretty much all on desktops again

Pilchenstein: May 17, 2012; So your plan is for half of us to die?; Hot Rope Guy

I'm looking to replace an amazon firestick with something that crashes a lot less and can also stream steam games from my pc - will a pi 4 be up to that and are there any compatible remote controls available?

# ¿ Jul 14, 2019 17:29

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# ¿ Apr 20, 2024 08:07

Pilchenstein: May 17, 2012; So your plan is for half of us to die?; Hot Rope Guy

Thanks for the advice everyone, I enjoy tinkering (and not spending much :v:

) so I think a Pi will do. Will the 1gb model be enough for streaming or should I get the 2gb?

# ¿ Jul 15, 2019 23:55

Pilchenstein: May 17, 2012; So your plan is for half of us to die?; Hot Rope Guy

I've been using a pi4 for steam streaming and watching videos off a fileshare for a while now but we just got a 4k tv as an early christmas present and I'm wondering if there's a way to scale the pi's desktop when using it in 4k? I would like to be able to play videos in 4k but I can't read the ui from the couch :v:

I read about the pixel doubling setting but apparently it's not available for the pi4, so is there an alternative? Failing that, could I set up a couple of desktop shortcuts to switch between 1080p and 4k?

# ¿ Dec 7, 2019 12:41

Pilchenstein: May 17, 2012; So your plan is for half of us to die?; Hot Rope Guy

VictualSquid posted:

You might have to switch window managers. Kde has a font and UI scaling option. And I remember those existing for enlightenment and xfce, too. But you need to check if those exist for the pi version.

Cool, I'll look into it, cheers

# ¿ Dec 7, 2019 13:37

Pilchenstein: May 17, 2012; So your plan is for half of us to die?; Hot Rope Guy

Rexxed posted:

He's got the cadence of a university lecturer

TV presenter on a computing show from the mid 80s :v:

# ¿ May 2, 2020 14:46

Pilchenstein: May 17, 2012; So your plan is for half of us to die?; Hot Rope Guy

Schadenboner posted:

You guys say these things as if they were bad things, though?

I assure you, I do not.

# ¿ May 2, 2020 14:57

Pilchenstein: May 17, 2012; So your plan is for half of us to die?; Hot Rope Guy

I have a pi4 that I use for game/video streaming from my PC to the telly and when I finally got around to streaming a 4k video from the PC, it wouldn't work - vlc just showed a black screen with no audio, kodi would play it but it stopped to buffer every 2 seconds. I copied the file to a usb and plugged it into the pi directly and got the exact same results. I did "sudo apt-get upgrade" which downloaded and installed over a gig of stuff and asked me to restart but from that point on the pi wouldn't boot.

I've reinstalled raspbian, which obviously downloaded updates as part of the process but still had the same issues. Searching online I found 2 possible solutions: increase the amount of video ram and make sure the hdmi lead is plugged into hdmi0 (the one nearest the power connector). The lead is plugged into the port next to power (although when I went to change the resolution, the app says "hdmi-1") but the video memory was really low, so I set it to 512mb. Now vlc will open the 4k file, though there's no picture in windowed mode (audio works though) and in fullscreen mode the picture looks like total dogshit (fuzzy and tons of artefacts).

My questions:
1 - is "sudo apt-get upgrade" the right command to make sure everything is up to date or did I brick the first install? :v:

2 - how do I make vlc work properly, is there some driver I need that doesn't come as standard?
3 - when people say the pi4 can play 4k video, does that only apply if it's encoded a specific way? The file I'm trying (which, for the record, plays perfectly in 1080p on my PC with no issues) is HEVC H.265 which as far as I can tell from googling, should be ok.

# ¿ Oct 27, 2020 18:45

Pilchenstein: May 17, 2012; So your plan is for half of us to die?; Hot Rope Guy

i vomit kittens posted:

Are you using the 64 bit Raspberry OS beta by chance? I know VLC is broken on it but I don't know to what extent. Either way, apt upgrade shouldn't brick your system though.

I have no idea, I'm just using whatever the default option was - how do I check that?

mod sassinator posted:

imho you want to get an nvidia shield to play back high res video files from your own network

Ok but I already have a pi and don't have �150 to spare :v:

Klyith posted:

The Pi 4 has HEVC acceleration that can do 4k60. The weirdness is that is can only do h264 in 1080p, because the decode hardware for older formats is unchanged from the 3 and before.

I would go for a dedicated video-streaming distro to do the job of being a video player. Supposedly rasperian + VLC has support for it if you're fully updated, but if you go with Kodi or libreelec they definitely have it in their base image and maintain their own ffmpeg patches for the Pi.

The two other things I use the pi for are streaming games from steam on my PC and very occasionally using a browser - can I do those on a dedicated distro? Is it possible to put more than one OS on and use a boot menu?

# ¿ Oct 27, 2020 23:50

Pilchenstein: May 17, 2012; So your plan is for half of us to die?; Hot Rope Guy

Klyith posted:

if you're still having trouble upgrading just reflash your sd card with the most recent release image

The reinstall got everything fully up to date so I've no idea what went wrong when I did it myself. Kodi wasn't playing 4k on the previous install but I never got to try it with more video ram allocated so hopefully that'll have helped.

Some Goon posted:

It's gonna be a lot easier just to have seperate sd cards with whatever install you want rather than multi booting.

The pi is out of the way behind the telly so swapping cards over would be a bit of a chore too. I'll just stick with raspbian and kodi for now and see how I get on.

# ¿ Oct 28, 2020 03:23

Pilchenstein: May 17, 2012; So your plan is for half of us to die?; Hot Rope Guy

Ok so I finally got a chance to try Kodi again and it's almost unusable - the UI is horrifically laggy. It streams 4k from my PC fine though - as long as you don't bring the UI up :v:

When I launch Kodi it tells me there's a newer version available but doing "sudo apt install kodi" in a terminal tells me it's up to date, so I've no idea how to get the latest version.

# ¿ Oct 29, 2020 07:39

Pilchenstein: May 17, 2012; So your plan is for half of us to die?; Hot Rope Guy

Sorry I should have said I did sudo apt update & upgrade first, I only tried updating kodi manually after that didn't work.

# ¿ Oct 29, 2020 08:28

Pilchenstein: May 17, 2012; So your plan is for half of us to die?; Hot Rope Guy

endlessmonotony posted:

A new version of Kodi exists.

It's not in the repos of your OS yet.

Fair enough :v:

# ¿ Oct 29, 2020 16:37

Pilchenstein: May 17, 2012; So your plan is for half of us to die?; Hot Rope Guy

SpaceSDoorGunner posted:

Hardest part was getting steaming services with all their lovely drm to work on chromium but that wasn't too difficult.

What I like most about linux is that there's an incredible body of knowledge available for almost any issue but because most of the solutions involve the terminal I get to feel like Mr Robot every time I perform even the most basic of tasks :v:

Speaking of which, I fixed the UI lag in Kodi by adding "usbhid.mousepoll=0" to /boot/cmdline.txt - the latest version switches to a terminal before launching and the terminal was apparently bad at reading the usb ports.

# ¿ Nov 5, 2020 01:08

Pilchenstein: May 17, 2012; So your plan is for half of us to die?; Hot Rope Guy

I've got a 2gb pi4 that I use for streaming games/video to the tv in the living room and it works great, but since it's sitting idle while I'm using my pc I'm wondering if there's an easyish way to offload tasks to it? I'm thinking specifically of video processing in Handbrake and a java app, both of which are cross platform, so I can probably figure out a workflow with ssh that involves moving files across the network, running the task and then moving them back but I figured I'd ask if there's a simpler solution beforehand :v:

To be clear, I know the pi will probably do this more slowly than my pc - my aim is just to free up the pc (which is old and shite) so I don't have to sit and twiddle my thumbs while one of these jobs is running.

# ¿ Sep 27, 2021 15:59

Pilchenstein: May 17, 2012; So your plan is for half of us to die?; Hot Rope Guy

Cheers, I'll see what I can get done now I know I'm on the right track.

# ¿ Sep 27, 2021 20:14

Pilchenstein: May 17, 2012; So your plan is for half of us to die?; Hot Rope Guy

Blue Footed Booby posted:

This. To anyone using a pi to do pretty much anything, the second you have an unused drive lying around, buy a cheap enclosure/adapter and use that. SD cards suck.

Possibly a stupid question but will an external drive work if it doesn't have a separate power connection, just usb? If so, what's the easiest way to clone my current setup onto the new drive?

# ¿ Nov 8, 2021 23:37

Pilchenstein: May 17, 2012; So your plan is for half of us to die?; Hot Rope Guy

VictualSquid posted:

It depends on the drive, and on if you have other usb devices connected.

All I know about the drive is it's a Seagate my brother was going to throw out but I have like, four different input devices connected to the pi so I'm guessing it's probably safer to wait until I have a drive with a power adapter.

# ¿ Nov 9, 2021 02:17

Pilchenstein: May 17, 2012; So your plan is for half of us to die?; Hot Rope Guy

I've got a pi4 that I use for streaming stuff from my pc to the telly but I'm wondering if there's any way to get it to stream from disney+ because there's no app for that on our smart tv. I have chromium media edition but when we tried that it ran like poo poo and I assume I've hosed the configuration up somehow and should just start over - is raspbian + chromium the best option for that or should I try a different os?

The pi is on a wired connection (and can stream 4k video from the pc) and disney+ works fine on other devices in the house so I don't think it's a bandwidth issue but any advice is helpful at this point.

# ¿ May 10, 2023 17:13

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# ¿ Apr 20, 2024 08:07

Pilchenstein: May 17, 2012; So your plan is for half of us to die?; Hot Rope Guy

I'll try the kodi addon since I'm already using kodi to stream from the pc, cheers.

# ¿ May 11, 2023 18:02

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Raspberry Pi: yeah we're pretty much all on desktops again