Raspberry pi pvr

[Andy Bircumshaw]

On 6 March 2012, at 16:07, Colin Law wrote:

> Is anyone looking at get-iplayer going on the Raspberry pi?  With an
> external disc it might make a nice mini-pvr.

The Raspberry Pi looks great, especially for iPlayer movies, but caveats:

• First generation hardware:
 •  Often buggy. See Pandora handheld console, Openmoko Freerunner. I learned this lesson the expensive way with the latter.
 • No enclosures currently available. In a year's time I'm sure you'll be able to buy a custom designed plastic box to put the Raspberry Pi in.

• Video decoding acceleration chip only applies to h264:
 • Is the CPU powerful enough for legacy media? Lots of videos you might find on the net are still .avi, DivX and so on. 
 • Does it support 10-bit h264? This seems to make a lot of improvement on banding / artefacts of re-encodes (i.e. DVD rips). See pages 9 & 11 of [1], examples section of [2]. These might look quite subtle in some of the screenshots, but artefacts tend to move around and "shimmer" when the video is being played back. If you don't tend to notice them then you're very lucky - once you start doing so, they're freakin' everywhere, and quite distracting!

I'm pretty sure the answer to the questions in the last 2 bullet-points is "no" and whilst I'm sure a LOT of people will be VERY happy with the Raspberry Pi, I think there will also actually be quite a lot of people who overlook these last two issues, be fired by the current levels of enthusiasm for the Pi and by seeing its playback of 1080p h264 and who will ultimately be equally disappointed. The Pi is *amazingly* good value, but it doesn't matter how cheap it is if it doesn't do the job. It will be *great* for video (such as iPlayer downloads) that is intended to be decoded on set-top-boxes and embedded devices, because these all suffer the same limitations, but I think there will be some people who decide in the end that it's a "waste of time" as a media centre.

aB.


[1] http://x264.nl/x264/10bit_03-422_10_bit_pristine_video_quality.pdf
[2] http://haruhichan.com/wpblog/?p=205