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> 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 us

by mtw 7y ago

> 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?

save_ferris 7y ago
I had no issues using an RPi 3 for my media center, playing 1080p video from an external hd, but my TV is pretty cheap and barebones.
zeta0134 7y ago
I've never had these problems with the various media center apps. My Pi 3B+ has been running Kodi for a few months now, and it happily plays 1080p videos at what appears to be smooth 60 FPS. 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.
- Legogris 7y ago
  Likewise. While a lightweight desktop on even the 3B+ can be excruciatingly slow, I ws using the 2 as streaming media center for 1080p video without issues. The main thing to look out for is compatible codecs.
squarefoot 7y ago
What review did you read? Playing video is likely the only thing the PI 3 does really well; even most H265 FHD do play without stuttering on the 3+ although we're close to the board limits. 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.
- bscphil 7y ago
  Apparently Verge said it "reportedly" struggles with 480p "Youtube videos". Which is doubly wrong, as who knows whether whatever mechanism was being used to play Youtube even supports the hardware decoding capabilities of the Pi. 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.
- arthurfm 7y ago
  It wasn't The Verge that originally said the Pi4 struggled to play YouTube videos [1], it was Tom's Hardware [2]. 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/raspberry-pi-4-release-date-news-features-4gb-ram-dual-dual-hdmi-gigabit-ethernet https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/6/24/18715211/r... [2] https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/raspberry-pi-4-b,6193.html https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/raspberry-pi-4-b,6193.h...
Hello71 7y ago
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/the-verges-gaming-pc-build-video https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/the-verges-gaming-pc-b... 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.
TaylorAlexander 7y ago
Can you link it? Was the video streaming or playing from disk? Perhaps it was an unsupported video codec? There are certain circumstances where the pi may struggle to play video, but I think for common formats they graphics driver has hardware level support for decoding. If the video format was weird and it had to decode with the CPU it could see problems. Another issue is the power supply. If you do not use a quality 2A power supply, a little red light by the power jack will indicate reduced power and it will throttle the CPU. This applies to the older PIs, but I've not seen the Pi4 yet.
- mtw 7y ago
  https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/6/24/18715211/raspberry-pi-4-release-date-news-features-4gb-ram-dual-dual-hdmi-gigabit-ethernet https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/6/24/18715211/r... 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
  - TaylorAlexander 7y ago
    "reportedly" Ugh.

by mtw 7y ago

> 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?

save_ferris 7y ago

I had no issues using an RPi 3 for my media center, playing 1080p video from an external hd, but my TV is pretty cheap and barebones.

zeta0134 7y ago

I've never had these problems with the various media center apps. My Pi 3B+ has been running Kodi for a few months now, and it happily plays 1080p videos at what appears to be smooth 60 FPS. 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.

Legogris 7y ago
Likewise. While a lightweight desktop on even the 3B+ can be excruciatingly slow, I ws using the 2 as streaming media center for 1080p video without issues. The main thing to look out for is compatible codecs.

squarefoot 7y ago

What review did you read? Playing video is likely the only thing the PI 3 does really well; even most H265 FHD do play without stuttering on the 3+ although we're close to the board limits. 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.

bscphil 7y ago
Apparently Verge said it "reportedly" struggles with 480p "Youtube videos". Which is doubly wrong, as who knows whether whatever mechanism was being used to play Youtube even supports the hardware decoding capabilities of the Pi. 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.
arthurfm 7y ago
It wasn't The Verge that originally said the Pi4 struggled to play YouTube videos [1], it was Tom's Hardware [2]. 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/raspberry-pi-4-release-date-news-features-4gb-ram-dual-dual-hdmi-gigabit-ethernet https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/6/24/18715211/r... [2] https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/raspberry-pi-4-b,6193.html https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/raspberry-pi-4-b,6193.h...

Hello71 7y ago

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/the-verges-gaming-pc-build-video https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/the-verges-gaming-pc-b... 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.

TaylorAlexander 7y ago

Can you link it? Was the video streaming or playing from disk? Perhaps it was an unsupported video codec? There are certain circumstances where the pi may struggle to play video, but I think for common formats they graphics driver has hardware level support for decoding. If the video format was weird and it had to decode with the CPU it could see problems. Another issue is the power supply. If you do not use a quality 2A power supply, a little red light by the power jack will indicate reduced power and it will throttle the CPU. This applies to the older PIs, but I've not seen the Pi4 yet.

mtw 7y ago
https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/6/24/18715211/raspberry-pi-4-release-date-news-features-4gb-ram-dual-dual-hdmi-gigabit-ethernet https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/6/24/18715211/r... 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
- TaylorAlexander 7y ago
  "reportedly" Ugh.