XBMC on Raspberry Pi - Wonder if this will work out? (Historical Discussion Thread)

(2012-08-08 14:33)pszab Wrote:  What are the exact details of the mkv?

Video
ID : 1
Format : AVC
Format/Info : Advanced Video Codec
Format profile : High@L4.1
Format settings, CABAC : Yes
Format settings, ReFrames : 4 frames
Codec ID : V_MPEG4/ISO/AVC
Duration : 2h 58mn
Bit rate : 15.5 Mbps
Width : 1 920 pixels
Height : 1 080 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 16:9
Frame rate : 23.976 fps
Color space : YUV
Chroma subsampling : 4:2:0
Bit depth : 8 bits
Scan type : Progressive
Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.312
Stream size : 18.9 GiB (87%)
Title : H.264 15.5 Mbps

Audio #1
ID : 2
Format : DTS
Format/Info : Digital Theater Systems
Codec ID : A_DTS
Duration : 2h 58mn
Bit rate mode : Constant
Bit rate : 1 510 Kbps
Channel(s) : 6 channels
Channel positions : Front: L C R, Side: L R, LFE
Sampling rate : 48.0 KHz
Bit depth : 24 bits
Compression mode : Lossy
Stream size : 1.88 GiB (9%)
Title : DTS 5.1 1510 Kbps
Language : English
Default : Yes
Forced : No

DTS playback is superior in OpenELEC r11766 than Raspbmc RC4 - I think the former is using Audio Engine while the latter is not.

My biggest issues with XBMC on the R-Pi are the following:

1) NFS is unstable in both Raspbmc & OpenELEC - quite often XBMC will return a bunch of NFS errors when accessing a FreeNAS 8.0.2 server for the first time (after booting), but work fine on second and subsequent attempts. My NFS works fine with XBMC 11 on Revo 3700, and also problems when accessed from a PCH or Ubuntu PC. Problems started with the upgrade of libNFS to 1.3 in XBMC. There is no disk spindown in the FreeNAS server, so no reason why the first access attempts should fail.

2) OMX-related errors in both Raspbmc and OpenELEC are present when caching new thumbnails, and this ultimately leads to system instability and is thus a chronic and major problem. Typical errors are insufficient resources (memory leak?), errors when resizing, timeouts. This problem is easy to reproduce - scan a movie library (I'm using MySQL for the video database, media can be accessed over SMB or NFS it makes no difference) then delete the Thumbnails directory and Textures13.db, reboot the Pi, and then finally browse Movies in Thumbnail view as it caches thumbnails to local (SD Card) storage - after browsing through the library for just a short while the OMX errors should become apparent with artwork no longer being displayed. Browse for long enough and the entire GUI will hang.

I just installed XBMC on a Pi and was wondering what the best way of connecting it to a windows server is - I have the video folder set as a publicly shared folder, and a xbox 360 can play videos from there (but not .mkv videos), how would I go about setting it up (so that I don't need to use a flash drive!)

Tekzilla has a clip of the set-up Raspberry Pi with XBMC in operation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zd3hn9q1vhw

I use SMB. Works fine.

Hi guys, would icefilms work on a raspberry pi?

anyone?

No Icefilms discussion/support here. See http://www.xbmchub.com

I've been using some different images, but I'm mostly impressed by XBian:

http://xbian.org/

Just a heads up.

(2012-08-15 12:23)Nu7s Wrote:  I've been using some different images, but I'm mostly impressed by XBian:

http://xbian.org/

Just a heads up.

Interesting. I'll have to give it a shot. Also updated the Raspberry Pi wiki page and made a new page for XBian. Feel free to add anything you think is good to know (I noticed the website didn't really have a lot of documentation, etc).