Hacker News Reader

Comment by avinassh | Hacker News Reader

Raspberry Pi is not really good as a media player. It struggles for high quality high bit rate 1080p videos and it is limited with USB 2 and does not have gigabit ethernet.

View on HN

My Raspberry Pi 2 is working great as a media player. I threw OSMC on it (a Linux distribution specifically for Kodi with specific support for Pi's) and it is essentially flawless. It has no problem with high bit rate H264 videos. The lack of gigabit Ethernet isn't an issue. 100Mb Ethernet can easily stream raw Blu-Ray video (not that I've tried that with the Pi 2).

Second this.

We also use it as a upnp-server to stream (over usb wifi) music/movies to the kids room.

Plus the kids run emulation-station[0] on _top_ of OSMC to play games --we had a hell of fun playing 4 players games.

[0] http://emulationstation.org/

It streams 1080p h264 just fine, haven't had a single issue yet.

The only movie so far I've had problems with was a raw Blu-Ray rip of Pixar's Up that I streamed from my NAS. It has some crazy high bitrates and just refused to play smoothly even with all caches turned up to 11.

But that's the only one from hundreds of movies I've tested.

I use an older Pi with Raspbmc (osmc) and I can stream 1080P movies just fine. The key is to 1.) Avoid streaming off a slow disk e.g. NAS, 2.) Ensure you have the necessary bandwidth to stream (no slow wifi), and 3.) Pass DTS audio to your receiver for decoding so your PI isn't doing double duty for audio/video.

It is also worth looking at NFS if you use a NAS. I have been able to stream movies over terrible Wifi by switching from Samba to NFS. This wasn't with a Pi though.

Initially, I tried this setup..

    disk [usb]-> router <-[wifi]-> raspB+ <- tv

but it wasn't good for streaming videos over the network. The router was the problem.

so when we upgraded to rasp2, I tried this setup..

    disk [usb]-> raspB+ <-[eth]-> router <-[wifi]-> rasp2

..and it's been working like that, flawless, for almost a year so far.

The raspB+ shares the media collection over upnp, so we can consume it from pretty much everywhere on the house, and the rasp2 consumes using upnp so when can control it remotely.

With a combination of these apps, you can do pretty much everything remotely from your phone..

- upnp: https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=org.droidupnp

- torrents: https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=org.sugr.gearshi...

- run stuff: https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=com.littlebyteso...

Now I just need a good radio support .. any ideas?

Not really true for Raspberry Pi 2. I'm running it with Kodi@OpenELEC next to my TV, it's set-up to connect to NFS via WiFi served by one of the SOHO Mikrotik routers. On the other end Synology DS215j NAS is cabled in via 1Gbit. No hiccup on 1080p/720p whatsoever despite WiFi choker, but haven't tried anything bitrate-crazy yet.

(For physical media I still just use a PS3.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com