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Well, as a not completely satisfied owner of: eSata Sheevaplug: currently NAS, no video, soft floating point. Raspberry Pi B/512: was a music server but the b

Well, as a not completely satisfied owner of: eSata Sheevaplug: currently NAS, no video, soft floating point. Raspberry Pi B/512: was a music server but the built-in audio is extremely crappy, unbalanced GPU/CPU power (damn you, DTS tracks), now sitting in a corner. Cubieboard: (current music server, stable, faster than RPi but no video hardware acceleration in linux). I just bought this in without much thinking. I hope now I can run XMBC and have hardware acceleration for video directly in Linux. As some other said, Freescale is much more open than the ones I listed above.

Ecio78 13y ago
Isn't Raspberry PI's gpu acceleration supported on XBMC (with the right driver and/or dedicated distro?)
- Uberphallus 13y ago
  Yes, but most HD content is delivered with DTS audio, and the CPU chokes hard on that. So either you output directly via HDMI passthrough(which in my case means a long ass cable from the projector to the speakers) or reencode. Also, even if HDMI audio works for you, XBMC interface is sluggish in the RPi. I'd check anything else for serious XBMC use.
  - Ecio78 13y ago
    I knew there were problems with some audio ouput, but I had read about the possibility of passthrough - in my case it will be ok. I suppose the CPU "choking" is only present when trying to let the RPi transcode the audio, right? I have a 2012 Panasonic Plasma TV and the integrated media player is so-so: i.e. it doesn't support external srt subtitles when playing mp4 or mkv files, so I have to remux them in mkv with subs in order to play them, and I was thinking about getting a RPi (and also changing my Seagate Dockstar tranmission/minidlna system with 2 or more disks NAS)
    - Uberphallus 13y ago
      In that case I think RPi can fit your needs, though the GUI will feel slow anyway.
      - fian 13y ago
        Were you using a Class 10 SD card? The preinstalled SD cards you could buy with Raspbian from places like element14 are really slow. Swap in a class 10 and XMBC becomes much more responsive.
        Uberphallus 13y ago
        Class 10, but it's not the issue, as XFCE + XBMC isn't even close to swapping in the 512MB model. It's more matter of CPU hogging on XBMC code (you can see it using ~20% idling).
casperc 13y ago
Can anyone comment on how this will do as a media server? I.e. will it be able to decode 720p and 1080p h264?
- Uberphallus 13y ago
  Supposedly yes: https://community.freescale.com/thread/301478 https://community.freescale.com/thread/301478 Don't know how stable Linux support is, though.

Ecio78 13y ago

Isn't Raspberry PI's gpu acceleration supported on XBMC (with the right driver and/or dedicated distro?)

Uberphallus 13y ago
Yes, but most HD content is delivered with DTS audio, and the CPU chokes hard on that. So either you output directly via HDMI passthrough(which in my case means a long ass cable from the projector to the speakers) or reencode. Also, even if HDMI audio works for you, XBMC interface is sluggish in the RPi. I'd check anything else for serious XBMC use.
- Ecio78 13y ago
  I knew there were problems with some audio ouput, but I had read about the possibility of passthrough - in my case it will be ok. I suppose the CPU "choking" is only present when trying to let the RPi transcode the audio, right? I have a 2012 Panasonic Plasma TV and the integrated media player is so-so: i.e. it doesn't support external srt subtitles when playing mp4 or mkv files, so I have to remux them in mkv with subs in order to play them, and I was thinking about getting a RPi (and also changing my Seagate Dockstar tranmission/minidlna system with 2 or more disks NAS)
  - Uberphallus 13y ago
    In that case I think RPi can fit your needs, though the GUI will feel slow anyway.
    - fian 13y ago
      Were you using a Class 10 SD card? The preinstalled SD cards you could buy with Raspbian from places like element14 are really slow. Swap in a class 10 and XMBC becomes much more responsive.
      - Uberphallus 13y ago
        Class 10, but it's not the issue, as XFCE + XBMC isn't even close to swapping in the 512MB model. It's more matter of CPU hogging on XBMC code (you can see it using ~20% idling).

casperc 13y ago

Can anyone comment on how this will do as a media server? I.e. will it be able to decode 720p and 1080p h264?

Uberphallus 13y ago
Supposedly yes: https://community.freescale.com/thread/301478 https://community.freescale.com/thread/301478 Don't know how stable Linux support is, though.