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Raspbmc Reviewed

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Chaos6

New Around Here
Glad to see another happy Pi user

I thoroughly enjoyed Scott's article on Raspbmc. I recently tried the other variant - XBian, and was similarly impressed. In fact, it has fewer issues playing live TV from my HDHomeRun Prime than my PS3!

Scott, out of curiosity, what was the CPU utilization when you were trying to play Super Troopers? Did you try "Turbo Mode" (1GHz)?
 
aiannar974, I've been streaming H.264 mp4's to the Pi for a week or so (and more importantly so has my wife) , so it would certainly be sufficient for locally hosted content as well. I'm sure the other options you mentioned would be sufficient as well, but they would certainly be more expensive, run hotter, and consume more power. You would also probably have to put some work into getting a remote to work with the other builds. I'm biased, but of the options you mentioned I would definitely go with the Pi.
 
Scott, what case did you use? I've read lots of good/bad reviews of simple clear cases (some people say they fit, some people say they don't). Wanted to know which one you had, where you got it, and if you like it! Thanks.
 
Chaos6 said:
I thoroughly enjoyed Scott's article on Raspbmc. I recently tried the other variant - XBian, and was similarly impressed. In fact, it has fewer issues playing live TV from my HDHomeRun Prime than my PS3!

Scott, out of curiosity, what was the CPU utilization when you were trying to play Super Troopers? Did you try "Turbo Mode" (1GHz)?
Click to expand...

Thank you Chaos6, it was a fun article to write. With Super Troopers the Pi CPU was pegged at 100% most of the time. That file is ginormous, 26GB, it's a bit-by-bit copy from a blu-ray DVD using our Vortexbox. It's not scaled down in any way.

I used default settings of Raspbmc, which I believe is 800MHz with Turbo Mode on. To be fair to the Pi, no tested media server has played that file without stuttering to this date. Our Samsung TV can play it smoothly, but it's the only device to date that can.

bsotak said:
Scott, what case did you use? I've read lots of good/bad reviews of simple clear cases (some people say they fit, some people say they don't). Wanted to know which one you had, where you got it, and if you like it! Thanks.
Click to expand...

Hi bsotak,

I have the clear case from RS.

http://raspberrypi.rsdelivers.com/product/rs/raspberry-pi-type-b-case-clear/caseclr.aspx

I don't have any complaints for it. It fits nice, connectors line up correctly and everything snaps together with no hardware. It probably wouldn't be so nice if you were going to remove the board often, but I don't have plans to do that. Running Raspbmc I might go for a darker case so the LEDs weren't distracting, but that was minor.

aiannar974, I would agree, give the Pi a try for your media server, it does amazingly well and it's very budget-friendly. The fact that it works with the TV remote was huge in my opinion. It's also small, unassuming, and takes almost no power.

flamaest, I'm sorry, have no input there. The audio in my testing was done via HDMI. Hopefully others can weigh in.
 
Last edited:
Thanks, I appreciate the reply. I already had a Pi ordered (arrives tomorrow), so it was good to see this review! Don't have a case yet though.

How do you think the lag is in the system?

Have you changed the display to 1080p for the menus? I read that things were a little slow with fanart at the 1080p, but that they were a little fuzzy at 720p.

Also, have you installed Raspbmc on a USB thumbdrive? I also read some things that it was faster than the USB thumbdrive, and that you could slightly overclock the Pi and be stable if you used USB.

I've got a QNAP 869 Pro that I'm planning on using NFS or SMB to grab all of my content over ethernet. Hope it works for the price!
 
The lag wasn't noticeable to me. Stopping a movie would sometimes lag for a second or two, but making menu selections seemed reasonable.

I left our display at 1920x1080 and did all of my testing at that.

I didn't try running it off the USB as it worked well on the SD card for me. IIRC, the Raspberry Pi forums had a big thread on overclocking and testing with different SD cards. The type of SD card was definitely shown to make a difference in the overclocking stability, I can't find the thread at the moment.

I didn't overclock for my testing beyond what Raspbmc does automatically.
 
sdeleeuw said:
The type of SD card was definitely shown to make a difference in the overclocking stability, I can't find the thread at the moment.
Click to expand...

I can confirm this with some anecdotal evidence. I was originally using XBian overclocked to 950MHz. Nothing shady, just via the standard SSH configuration menus. That was on an old 1GB SD card I had laying around. It didn't even have a class designation. After about a day of use, it managed to destroy itself during a reboot. Nothing but a kernel panic message every time I power cycled.

Having read something similar regarding stability, I switched to a Class 6 card and haven't had any problems since (for about a week and a half now). I'm still overclocking to 950, and overvolting by 6.
 
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