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OptimusMatrix posted:So I got one of these when they first came out cause I wanted to use it to stream movies from my computer to my TV but I've got not the time nor the patience to learn how to set it up. So if any of you goons wanna buy it, they shipped it today and should be here in a couple days. I'll sell it to you for what I bought it for which is $35 bucks plus the price of shipping. Just lemme know if you want it. PM sent... I still have my Commodore 64, and when Jack Tramiel passed earlier this year, I pulled it out of the closet and have been hacking around on it for the past few months. Thanks to the still-vibrant scene, I've got it talking on the intarwebs via ethernet, and finding all kinds of things to run on it.  One of the things I keep bumping into is the fact that, despite how much development has continued in the past couple decades, I'm still hacking around on a 30-year-old platform. It will never be useful/valuable beyond the novelty of using something that old to do something (anything) practical. There are folks out there that run web-servers on stock C64s, but I'm not sure I see the long-term value in that. The RaspberryPi, on the other hand, seems an eminently hackable platform that can be turned into something noteworthy. There are lots of good ideas what to do with this, and I'm having some of my own ideas (a web-server frontend to heyu to run the lights in the house) what to do with this.
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Jun 2, 2012 17:58
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Pweller posted:Is there any risk of enough heat building up to eventually/possibly light the paper up? I saw mention on the RPi forum that using paper for "cases" was something that they considered, and that aside from damage to the RPi itself, fire was extremely unlikely. One of the founders put it like "Look, it's 5V at 700mA or so. By design, nothing gets hot enough to be a concern at all." The subsequent discussion drilled the point home - If you're using a paper case for your RPi and it catches on fire, something bad (i.e. unusual) has happened - like damage to the board/components/etc causing a dead short somewhere. Still, the amount of current involved is pretty low, so things have to have been going really badly for fire to be a result.
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Jun 6, 2012 19:24
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berzerker posted:For those wanting a RasPi HTPC, the XBMC port is in release candidate stages now: http://www.raspbmc.com/ Now if only I could order one of these gadgets some day. Thanks for the link! I just got an RPi yesterday afternoon, and have been hacking around on it a bit since. I hadn't got 'round to investigating XBMC with any seriousness yet, so this comes in handy. The image is a couple hundred megs, and it goes through a bit of a setup routine on first boot. It takes about 20-30 minutes to get everything in place. I was a little disappointed that it doesn't (yet?) seem to know how to do DLNA/UPnP (I have a Servio box on the network to serve up a bunch of stuff), but it was quite happy to mount a regular ol' USB thumb-drive and play TV:  Performance isn't stellar by any stretch of the imagination, but it does work. It does behave pretty well with straight-up playback; I didn't see any stutterring or skipped frames. XBMC can overlay the video with UI (as shown), and the RPi doesn't really handle that very well. Shortly after I took that snapshot, I had to power-cycle to regain control. Also, cueing back and forth in a file is a little rough. For casual viewing, though, it seems to be pretty reasonable. Very promising progress...
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Jun 8, 2012 04:01
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I'm in the same state; surpringly impressed at how well it actually does. I found that it does handle DLNA/UPnP just like the other builds of XBMC on other platforms. Playback (and searching through a show is a bit smoother when sourcing it over Ethernet vs USB. The more I play with/use RaspBMC, the more impressed I am, given the low-spec hardware. I'm going to try an experiment this weekend. Can RaspBMC stand in for my GoogleTV and my ATV2 for normal local playback? Obviously, Netflix and Hulu aren't available, but I've got plenty of other stuff to throw at it to see where its limits are. Fun! 
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Jun 9, 2012 03:51
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I agree - the GPU is a major player in decoding/rendering video. The SoC is *only* 700MhZ, and I'm running the default 192/64 split, but the RPi easily renders 720p (in my experience) and 1080p (according some of the other reports I've seen). Experimenting with low-end Windows/Mac/Linux systems without GPUs (or lovely ones), I established a (for me) thumbnail guide - To properly decode/display/stream .mkvs, a 1Ghz (or better) CPU is necessary. MKVs require a bit of heavy lifting, computationaly, to play back (compared to xvid or divx). My RaspXBMC setup has progressed. I've moved what I pictured the other day to the big screen in my living room, and I've loaded up XBMC Remote on my iPhone and Android (Nook colour) tablet. Both control it perfectly, so I no longer need the USB wireless keyboard attached (which had lovely range anyway). Plus, it really does look gorgeous on a 65" display. Echoing my earlier comment that using DLNA/UPnP with XBMC does offer marginally better behaviour. My guess is that interrupts via USB (for the memory stick and maybe wireless keyboard dongle) are more expensive than interrupts for Ethernet. There are some visual artifacts during seeking, but they settle out as soon as the camera angle changes in the video stream. All this makes RaspBMC a pretty practical playback media center after all. I might have been a little more negative about it in my original post. Also, HDMI audio works perfectly and properly sends AC3 streams (still have DTS to check) through the passthrough, and I get glorious 5.1 audio on my 720p streams through this. I will say that it's still a little rough in places, but that's entirely expected as an RC2 release. Very worth playing with this way. FWIW, neither my ATV2 or GoogleTV has had anything to do since I started this part of the experiment. I wonder how well it'll do playing music.. I wonder if I can shoe-horn Pandora in there.. I wonder... Just in case I wasn't clear, this is all with RaspBMC. This is Fun!!  edit: Update on my experience throwing different stuff at RaspBMC 1: I'm seeing the same "30-second cutoff" that I'd either read here ITT, or on the RPi forum. The thing is that it'll freeze about 30 seconds from the end of the file, and will eventually return to the XBMC UI when it's *actually* done. Whatever - it's a thing with RaspBMC RC2. Avoid. I watch too much House, so it's clear in my testing that the punchline is pretty much always cut off. Fail. 2: Music over DLNA to RPi works, but... .mp3 playback is pretty far from gapless between tracks. I'm seeing a 2-4 second pause between tracks. Very distracting. Also, it looks like ONLY .mp3's work right now. I've a bunch of AACs (.m4a) in my library, and it refuses to play an "unknown format". Don't have any .flacs or whatever else the "cool kids" use these days, but it (RaspBMC) kinda doesn't fit well with the library I've already got. Although, you can easily transcode parts of it to work as a mobile player of some kind, so.. meh. Gotta call that aspect a Fail too. 3: DTS is supported. I encoded a Superbit DVD of Gattaca to MKV using Handbrake. In the encoder, I made sure that the ONLY audio track selected for inclusion was "DTS Passthrough"; it won't play audio on my laptop or any other non-DTS device. The RPi dutifully passes the DTS stream in the MKV container and my AV receiver lit up "DTS" as it normally does. Win. None of these "faiulures" are any fault of the RPi itself. RaspBMC is a promising start, but it's not quite "there" yet. Given that I've already got ATV2 and GTV, I think my RPi is going to go back to a code-hacking box of some kind. Or a LAMP stack. Or... (also, apologies for the wall of words) rustybikes fucked around with this message at 00:32 on Jun 10, 2012 |
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Jun 9, 2012 20:05
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bolind posted:Since the ethernet port runs over USB as well, that can't really be the explanation. They should both do 512 byte USB bulk transfers... Actually, I think that is the explanation. During my initial testing, the RPi was connected to a keyboard/mouse. When I moved it to the bigscreen, control was done with XBMC Remote on my iPhone, so nothing was connected to USB at that point. When I did that, performance for DLNA/UPnP improved just a little bit more. I still can't use it as a media center platform, but RaspBMC is still in active development.
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Jun 13, 2012 19:49
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I'd heard there were more like 50K of the RPis in the wilds. Given the startup costs, manufacturing, etc., I think they did pretty good for a first release. With the revenue generated by the sales of these, production should ramp up as things progress. I've also heard that the next drop won't happen until September. 
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Jun 19, 2012 20:50
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Red Robin Hood posted:By "next drop" do you mean available for purchase or do you mean getting shipments out? Errm.. Getting shipments out would mean that they're available for purchase. What are you asking? The way the comment I saw read, they would be purchasable again in September from Farnell/RS.
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Jun 20, 2012 14:42
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Red Robin Hood posted:Hmm... Well I made my purchase by my shipping date is 6 weeks out! Oh. I get what you're saying. My shameful admission is that I've picked up a couple of these on eBay. Yes, I paid 4-5 times list, but that premium is worth it (for me) to get to play with this thing. I got one to talk to the CM11 controller to control the X10 lights in the house using heyu. I then put Apache/PHP on, crafted a bit of code, and now I can control the lights in my house with my iPhone (or other WebKit browser). And I'm just getting started. I look forward to the time when sales of the RPi fund production so that the six-week waits are a memory.
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Jun 20, 2012 15:53
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It took me a bit to get over the sticker shock on eBay; I took a couple weeks considering it. When I learnt ITT and at the RPi forums that it would be several months before we can order from them again, the decision was made a little easier. I could either wait and dream/drool about all the cool things I could do with it. All summer. Or, I could suck it up, pay the premium and play all summer with these. It's not a method I recommend, necessarily, mostly because of the price-gouging these guys are doing on eBay. On the other hand, it is capitalism in action - charge what the market will bear.
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Jun 20, 2012 17:10
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| # ¿ Apr 20, 2024 01:02 |
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Adafruit claims to have 'em: http://www.adafruit.com/products/998
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Feb 14, 2013 22:32
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