Have you heard of the Raspberry Pi? Surprisingly enough, they’re starting to trickle into the hands of thousands of hackers, and we were fortunate to get our hands on one (second-hand since we didn’t jump in time for the initial preorder). We’ve longed for a tiny embedded option for running XBMC and this is one of the best opportunities we’ve seen yet., created by [Sam Nazarko], is tailored to getting XBMC on the Raspberry Pi just a few minutes after it arrives in the mail.

Raspberry Pi Codec Licenses for AVI MPG WMV DVD. Part of their cost cutting measures included not purchasing a pricey blanket license to use the MPEG-2 and VC-1 video codecs. This doesn't mean the Raspberry Pi is not capable of decoding. Your Raspberry Pi IP Address. Voucher Code For Your Freedom Serial Season. In XBMC, go to SYSTEM / SYSTEM INFO. Jan 25, 2015. If you have tried to play on your Raspberry Pi XBMC mpeg2 content like. Once you get the actual keys you just add following lines to config. Txt The little shield then gets connected to the Raspberry Pis main pin header. Ssh-keygen-t rsa mv bootbootenablessh. Rc bootboot Rc. From what I gather the RasPi.

And that’s exactly what we did. If you’re familiar with writing an image to an SD card (or any device for that matter) this is a simple process. Raspbmc is distributed as a single image file which starts up the RPi hardware, then copies itself to RAM while it downloads and installs the filesystem for the distribution. Once the card is flashed just pop it in, power up, and wait about 20 minutes until XBMC shows up on the screen. After that it’s a quick boot each time. The good news is that its works.

XBMC runs pretty fast, with just a hint of lag when loading some menus. We felt at home using the confluence skin we’re familiar with, and had no trouble setting up our samba shares to the video library. The one problem is that it won’t play any of the video files we have on hand. None of them. So we downloaded the Big Buck Bunny trailer.

It wouldn’t play that either. This is all a codec issue. Although the chip used on the RPi is capable of hardware decoding MPEG2 video, the foundation didn’t license that ability. So it can’t play that format, period. With the movie trailer we tried the OGG format and that’s not currently supported, but the MOV version did play, in full 1080p without trouble.

So the verdict is, if you’re looking to get an RPi just to run XBMC you should wait. So far the package is promising. But we record ATSC video, all of which is MPEG2. If you use MakeMKV to store your DVDs on a server, that also uses MPEG2. Of course there is the option of transcoding everything. But you’ll want to be careful if you have other XBMC frontends which may not be able to play alternative encodings.

Posted in Tagged,,, Post navigation. 2d Psp Games Download here. I’ve been running RaspBMC since I received my RPi and I’m very happy with the progress its making. The latest version is more stable, faster and generally nicer to use now. It’s played all 480, 720 and 1080 formats I’ve thrown at it without missing a beat, even high bitrate BluRay rips. Looks perfect on my 50″ plasma (which actually powers it via USB mind you). Embedded audio over HDMI is flawless, and streaming movies from my NAS is hassle free as well as media from a USB. For a bit of extra performance I’ve overclocked the CPU to over 900mhz and bumped the GPU and RAM both up by 50mhz, makes it a little bit snappier.

Its slower and less featured than my daily full blown XBMC hardware, but a $35, dead quiet, power-sipping Media Center I can carry to work in my pocket for lunch time entertainmentcant go wrong with that. That would have been my thinking too, since a P150 could do it but as I’ve been discovering with my own projects, the core part of ARM when it comes to anything with a LOT of heavy math clock-per-clock is inferior to even a 486DX, much less anything with MMX or SSE. The SIMD instructions are too task specific limiting what you can do with them, the ALU is a toy compared to a 1980’s 8087 (apart from the clock speed), and the VFP extentions are still only 32 bit, barely able to handle the minimum requirements for a GLFloat.

I mean lands sake, no double or extended precision? They’re joking, right? After two days playing with code for a 1.5ghz ARM 8 on a tablet, I couldn’t help but thinking “This is 2012, right?”.

The license enables you to decode and encode (where applicable) the mentioned media types using the built in hardware encoders/decoders. • H.264 Encode is enabled in the latest version (Included in Pi Price) which is great! • For an extra £2.40 you can watch MPEG2 video, • For an extra £1.20 you can decode VC-1 video, Hardware en/decoders are much faster and do not rely on the core CPU to process these files; rather the GPU is used to process the files. It talks directly to the Video Memory (decoding) or RAM (encoding) making it nice and smooth. You do not need this license and can use software versions. But it is really slow.

The license will be a file you place somewhere or a key you define as a global variable for the system. The en/decoder libraries will request these and pass them into the hardware where they will be resolved on that chip; if the key matches the serial number and is valid you will be allowed to use the exposed API (I can see this getting hacked very quickly). Raspberry Pi did not include this to keep costs down.

For us, a few quid is ok, but if they made a million units that is £3.6million extra they have to spend on something only a fraction of people will use.