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Hi
I'm planning to get one of these for the kids' non HDMI TVs. I understand that I'll need to solder the composite feed and the audio high/low pass circuits to provide the outputs to go into the TV.
It should be OK to play x264 1080p videos over wireless right? (yeah it wont display 1080p... but it's that size for when they want to watch it on the projector.)
Thanks
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You can adjust the buffering kodi does in advanced settings, but 1080p over wifi is a hit or miss. It all depends on the bitrate and other things. You would be better off with a direct connection, or attaching more memory onto the Pi with a portable HDD or thumbstick (and putting the videos on them)
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Sorry... badly phrased question. I was just setting the scene on what the pi was going to do and actually wanting to know if the zero would be acceptable from a horsepower perspective.
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noggin
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2017-03-24, 12:15
(This post was last modified: 2017-03-24, 12:16 by noggin.)
How good is your 2.4GHz WiFi environment - are you in a really congested area, or do other 2.4GHz devices work fine with the content you want to play?
The Pi Zero W has reasonable 2.4GHz 802.11n functionality (no worse than the Pi 3B). You're unlikely to be able to stream direct, un-recompressed, high-quaility Blu-ray content over WiFi, but lower bitrate re-encodes are likely to be OK if you have a decent WiFi environment.
I live in a very built up area with dense housing and everyone has their own WiFi access point. A quick check just now shows there are more than 30 2.4GHz WiFi access points within range of my laptop. This doesn't bode well for WiFi throughput at 2.4GHz in my environment. If your situation is different, you will get a different result.
Experimentally I've been playing with a Pi Zero W as a TV Headend server, and SD MPEG2 stuff which is <5Mbs is fine here, but HD H264 which can peak over 13Mbs here is less robust.
As others have said, increasing buffer sizes can help even out brief periods of bandwidth reduction, but they can't mitigate too low an overall average bitrate.
