My next HTPC will be Raspberry Pi - Page 3

 

You can use MakeMKV or DVDFab or lots of other programs to extract only the main movie and make an mkv.   It's still a huge file, but much smaller than a full .iso and it doesn't take as long to create.  

Yeah, I've used MKV, but I'm kind of leary of programs like that.

a couple a quick questions for you guys.

Was thinking of just taking my blu-rays and using makeMKV for no loss in quality.

some blu-rays get pretty high in bitrate. Can Raspberry pi handle them. Also with the new OpenElec can you bitstream. If you can't will openelec remix the audio.

What I am trying to do is have XBMC for all my tv''s, and for my main TV a higher power HTPC.

Thanks.

I'm also curious about this. From what I've heard though, the Raspberry Pi will struggle with decoding 5.1 audio (so you need to bitstream), and it will also struggle streaming using SMB.

I am just trying to find a solution for my house but do not want to spend too much on my bedroom for example. I just need enough power to play to the tv, and don't want to have different encodes for different devices.

 

You can bitstream DD and DTS, but not DTS-HD or Dolby TrueHD.  If you have a DTS-HD bluray rip, it'll bitstream the DTS core.    I haven't encountered any problems with any of my BD rips, but I don't know which ones are high in bitrate.   Can you tell me some popular high bit rate titles ... maybe I have some of them.      All of my files are on a Synology NAS with the R-Pi accessing NFS shares via gigabit LAN.    Take a few moments to set up NFS shares and it'll save you a lot of SMB headaches.   

I forget which one but I believe there is one on Planet Earth.

Two high bit rate scenes I can think of off the top of my head are the bus going through the bank at the beginning of The Dark Knight and the boxes exploding in Inception.

Any more feed back on this?

from what I gathered it is a great device, but the Letdown from a HTPC perspective is the fact that it will not output DTS-HD or True-HD. Even having them in the stream and the system has issues reading the core. Also it has issues with High Bitrate movies.

That's disappointing, but not wholely unexpected at $35. What we probably need is something produced in the $100 range.

There is a couple coming on the 99$ range with the Tegra3 but I do not know what the capabilities are. The only review I saw on the tegra 3 was on the sony tablet and I was disappointed by it.

The ouya console is one of them.

Nvidia has not released Linux drivers for it's Tegra line. Because of their great Linux GPU drivers, I was at first hopeful, but my hope has been greatly diminished. I will no longer buy a tablet with a closed-source CPU/GPU.

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Edited by PobjoySpecial - 5/16/13 at 2:12pm

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=152339

Good thread showing some stuff.

Started playing around with this. The 'sexy' theme is ugly to me, but of course the functionality is what is important. I just wish that you could have both easily, so for instance on my HTPC it accesses the regular Blu-Ray menu and then on something running XBMC, it could access the speedmenu. I did a quick test and it appears to be just the index.bdmv and MovieObject.bdmv files that are changed (could be wrong). I was thinking of creating a second folder with the speedmenus then just creating hardlinks for all the folders so I could have the best of both worlds.

Thanks for posting, that really looks great! I'm going to give it a shot I think. I mean, what the heck, its around a total of $50!

This is probably a really generic question, but what happens when a movie has TrueHD? Can the Raspberry Pi pass that through (is that what people mean by bitstreaming?) or will it select the normal Dolby Digital track automatically if it can't handle TrueHD? (Obviously sending audio via HDMI).

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Edited by PobjoySpecial - 5/16/13 at 2:14pm

can these things playback 1080p well ??? or most video formats well ????

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Edited by PobjoySpecial - 5/16/13 at 2:15pm

Thanks! The TV obviously doesn't need the HD audio formats since it only has two speakers anyway. I'm just more concerned with the WAF. Can't have her calling me at the office because Brave or something isn't playing any audio!

From what I have read if you have True-hd in the Stream or DTS HD it will try and decode it, and that is where the video will stutter.

The Best Scenario for this is to have a AAC or AC3 track so it can bitstream it.

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Edited by PobjoySpecial - 5/16/13 at 2:16pm

I just received two Pi's this week and have been doing some experimenting with XBMC and also MythTV. I first tried OpenElec but the Mythbox plugin would not install. Anyone else using XBMC as a frontend for MythTV?

I also tried the RaspBian spin and added MythTV frontend but playback was horrible to unusable with default settings. I also just purchased the Mpeg codecs. Is anyone using MythTV fronted on their Pi and care to share their settings?

TIA

I've been trying to find a place to buy one of these locally. Its hard to believe, but so far in NYC I have been unable to find a single place!

Err - passthrough IS bitstreaming isn't it?

AIUI the Raspberry Pi will bitstream/passthrough DD and DTS fine, but not HD Audio (True HD and DTS HD). It's decoding these formats (and HD Audio) to PCM that are problematic.

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Edited by PobjoySpecial - 5/16/13 at 2:21pm

I was hyped up by the Pi but after doing some research I discovered the MK802 II by Rikomagic (or similar variants) is basically the same PC on a USB/HDMI stick but better hardware for the same price as the Pi. Runs Android 4.0/4.1 or Linux just like the Pi.

MK802 III (or MK808) has even better hardware (dual core ARM @ 1.6 Ghz) for around $55.

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Edited by PobjoySpecial - 5/16/13 at 2:22pm

Good points. I think the video decoding is starting to round into shape for the major codecs.