> Raspberry Pi 3 media center
Just read theverge review on how the Pi struggles to play a video full screen, even if resolution is 480p. How are then people using it as a media center?
Just read theverge review on how the Pi struggles to play a video full screen, even if resolution is 480p. How are then people using it as a media center?
Are you sure the writer didn't use the board the wrong way? Some people still believe that videos should be streamed after being transcoded because that is the only way to watch them on their ridiculously limited smart TV which lacks the necessary codecs to watch them the right way. Of course doing this over WiFi would make the problem even worse. To optimize network usage, videos should be kept encoded until they reach the player so that the network won't be clogged. If you use the PI to read the movie as a file over a shared SMB or NFS directory, the network usage is so low that you could watch like 20 different movies on 20 different players on the same home network at the same time. Probably even more.
The PI 3 (and to some extent probably the PI4 too) is still behind many other boards in other contexts (openness, performance, price) but playing video is surely not one of them.
I'm not sure that transcoding has anything to do with it, unless the transcoding was happening on the Pi itself (which would indeed be dumb). Most of the time people are transcoding things it's x264 -> x264 with Plex, just with a much lower bitrate (and probably 720p) because (as you say) their player's platform can't handle it and no one cares about video quality these days.
Tom’s Hardware’s review notes that the hardware is able to handle many everyday tasks such as web browsing with up to 15 Chromium tabs, light image editing using GIMP, and document and spreadsheet work using LibreOffice. Unsurprisingly, the sub-$100 miniature PC has its limits. It reportedly struggles with full screen video playback from YouTube for example, even if you turn down the resolution to 480p.
Tom's Hardware were using a pre-release OS so it's possible the issues with video playback were caused by this?
It’s important to note that, at launch time, some important Raspberry Pi software doesn’t yet work on the Pi 4. To run Pi 4, you’ll need to download a brand new build of the Raspbian OS, Raspbian Buster. And not everything runs in Buster yet. During testing, we found numerous Python libraries or other required packages that weren’t compatible with the new OS.
My biggest problems involved video playback. If I wanted to watch a YouTube video, I had to keep it in a window, because even in 480p resolution, it was jerky at full screen. The other task I’d like to perform is playing retro games, but as of this writing, the Retropie package of emulators doesn’t work with Pi 4.
During extensive hands-on testing, I found that, while the 4K at 30 Hz is tolerable, little things like the movement of the mouse pointer are a bit sluggish. If you have a 4K screen, you’re definitely better off going for the 60 Hz mode, but note that the added voltage may also cause your CPU to get hot and throttle more easily.
While surfing the web, looking at still images and just enjoying all the extra screen real estate of 4K is great, video playback is the Raspberry Pi 4’s Achille’s heel, at least as of this writing. Whether we were attempting to stream a 4K video or use a downloaded file, we never got a smooth, workable 4K experience, either in Raspbian Buster or LibreElec, an OS that runs the Kodi media player. Several H.264 encoded videos, including Tears of Steel, did not play at all or showed as a jumble of colours. Even the sample jelly fish videos that the folks at Kodi recommended for my testing appeared as still pictures with no movement. Clearly, there’s a lot of optimization that still needs to be done both on the OS and software side to make the Raspberry Pi 4 capable of playing 4K video.
Unfortunately, even streaming 1080p YouTube videos is a challenge at this point. Running at 1080p resolution, full screen video trailer for Stranger Things showed obvious jerkiness. However, the playback was smooth when I watched the same clip in a smaller window. The same problem occurred, even when I dropped the stream’s resolution down to 480p.
Playing offline 1080p videos works well, provided your screen is at 1920 x 1080 or lower resolution. A downloaded trailer of Avenger’s Endgame was perfectly smooth when I watched it using the VLC player.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/6/24/18715211/r...
[2] https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/raspberry-pi-4-b,6193.h...
tl;dr they "built a gaming pc" with a "wireless anti static bracelet", RAM installed in single channel, backwards PSU, terrible parts choices... don't trust the verge.
Mind, this is specifically running under Kodi, which is optimized as a media center, and is NOT running also a full desktop environment. Attmepting to do the same in, say, the stripped down Chromium browser was an exercise in frustration. That's always been a major limitation of the 3D acceleration in the Pi, as the libraries took a long while to mature and were always a bit hacky.
The announcement for proper OpenGL support and compositing in the desktop environment is huge for me. It seems like it'll finally push the Pi up into "workshop computer" territory that, while underpowered, should be just capable enough to run some of my always on operations and act as a lightweight CAD station for small parts. I ordered one as soon as I woke up and saw the announcement, and we'll see how well that works in practice.
they write "It reportedly struggles with full screen video playback from YouTube for example, even if you turn down the resolution to 480p."
I was surprised by this review too. Not sure where they get that from
Ugh.