Raspberry Pi - HD media player, HDTV player

Hello, I want to share a little practical research on the possibility of using the Raspberry Pi model B 512mb as a media player and IPTV player for HD content. Also a little discussion about such an ideal device.

The search did not give specific answers, there was varying data that spoke more about the dampness and GIKovatost similar use of a single-board computer.

Please tackle for details ...

Given:

• 50 "TV with HDMI-CEC support ;
• video file storage (in my case, PC);
• LAN
• broadband internet access.

Formulation of the problem:

1. Requires an omnivorous media player.
2. Use a television remote control to control the console (I wanted to avoid an additional remote control, mouse, keyboard, smartphone).
3. IPTV, video on demand.
4. Media Library. Initially, I did not set a similar task, having a defeatist mood on this score, but add this item as an option.

1. Requires an omnivorous media player

OS choice: Geexbox , Raspbmc , Openelec . All represent variations on XBMC shell themes . They all look something like this.


I must make a digression, I will divide the video quality into 5 categories in increasing order: SD rip (up to 3GB), HD 720 rip (3-9 GB), HD 1080 rip (11-31GB), BDremux (~ 20GB), BD ISO (~ 40GB ) (the last two are different, only in that additional material, additional soundtracks, disc menus, etc. are cut from remux). In order not to go deeper, because there may be exceptions, a Rip curve and the like, we will consider my observations to be similar to the average temperature in the hospital. The sizes are perfect conditional and taken from the test collection. For testing, he took the most "large" representatives. 3D leave out of the scope of this article.

The first to test were Geexbox and Raspbmc. The TV remote control (cec support) works out of the box, but the responsiveness of the interface cooled the ardor right away, it turned out that the inability to watch video above HD 720 rip, and the reflection on the Internet about the lack of hardware acceleration in VLC and similar players to watch streaming video content made me put the "raspberry" on the table.

Nuance number of times- this is the choice of an SD card, or rather inattention when choosing. I got the Raspberry Pi already with a class 6X card. Changed to a card from the car radio with the proud inscription 133X. Although judging by the inscription, the speed should be higher than class 16, but in practice it was possible to get only 8 mB / s, which is below class 10. At this stage, the choice was made in favor of Openelec (only because the turn has come). The choice is subjective and all further description will be about this OS.
The situation with video playback changed with a fast card. HD rip 1080 also played (except for one 31 GB rip) on it, like on BD ISO, BDremux left friezes.

Half measures fight!

Nuance number two - turbo modeoverclocking the processor to 1 GHz. This overclocking is officially authorized and does not affect the warranty. When the temperature rises, the turbo mode will turn off (cpu freq driver should follow this). The temperature for 85 degrees Celsius is terrible, but I have not seen above 65.
With this configuration, we get a smooth interface with almost no delay. Also, all video content except for BD ISO is read from my catalog. BDremux go without a problem.

Summary of task number 1

When using a fast SD card or a fast USB flash drive as a system partition, and turning on the turbo mode, we get an almost perfect player. BD ISO stopped braking when viewed from a hard drive connected directly to the Raspberry Pi, but since we didn’t manage using SMB, we assume that it didn’t.

Installing the OS, regular acceleration (turbo mode), transferring the OS to a USB stick, all are described in detail on wiki.openelec.tv. Let's go further, it was the main and most difficult task.

2. Support HDMI-CEC works immediately after the first start of the system

It’s convenient to control the remote control and I never had a desire to take the mouse or keyboard that I connected, thinking that their help would be needed during the initial setup of the system. (Although I’m lying, the rewind system is not quite well implemented, namely access to the seekbar is available from the mouse, but not from the remote control. The remote control uses the corresponding buttons to rewind).
But this is my “fad”, I have three devices from different manufacturers, a TV, an audio amplifier and now a player, are controlled by a television remote control via CEC. I should note that CEC support in TVs is not an indicator of an expensive class. For example, from a Korean manufacturer of two letters back in 2008, this technology was used on budget models. I lead to the fact that when buying, you should probably pay attention to the support of this function, as well as to the possibility of its presence in your old TVs.

Summary of task number 2

The task is fully completed without reservation.

3. IPTV, video on demand

The television part in XBMC was originally sharpened, for various tuners. At the first unsuccessful stage of getting to know the XBMC on the Raspberry Pi, intuitively, I could not understand who, in principle, needed to pass a playlist to get a picture. Attempts to feed “complex” playlists by SMB to the main player (omxplayer) led to a crash, but the simplest actions, launching a stream on a PC, a playlist with a link to this stream, gave a positive, but not satisfactory result. The Internet was filled with scary stories about attempts to view alternative players, java scripts, transforming into “correct” playlists and other nonsense. I describe the torment only because initially for me the working version was not obvious, I admit my own helplessness.

So, in openelec (maybe there are others as well, it’s just a choice, the distribution didn’t let you down, it stopped looking the other way) you need to enable for the TV category, plug-in from the official PVR repository IPTV Simple Client (System - Settings - Disabled add-ons - PVR clients ) In the plugin settings, set the path to the playlist via SMB, enable PVR (System - Settings - TV - Enable PVR). The TV category appears on the main screen and everything works.

Flashback. I should note that I have not watched TV channels for ten years. If you are interested in broadcasts, the solution is YouTube, the cinema is “buying a movie,” of course. The presence of some endless stream of advertising depresses me. I am deprived as a class of channel switching mania, because my assessments in this regard will not be objective.

Speed ​​of work.

Switching on via the http HD channel over the Internet takes 5-7 seconds, normal SD 3-4 seconds. Surely, with a total load on the network, these indicators increase. VLC from PC enables faster. UDP (igmp) is more fun. My preferences are Football in HD, Discovery in HD, such a non-fast switch does not interfere. Normal people may not make such a compromise, as well as find a decent source of IPTV.

Summary of task number 3

It has been fundamentally resolved, but with reservations, the topic is extensive, there is nothing to cover.

4. Media Library

Flashback. I love Cinema, about eight years ago, I dug up the film library to the size of third-order units of DVD discs. I tried to catalog simply, to numbered disks, a simple list with a small description. At the moment, half is either lost, or scratched, or "given to see." Once every three years I turned to search engines on the topic of cataloging. There are many solutions, they seemed strange.

And then XBMC pops up an already included plugin. When mounting a folder with films, you can indicate that there are films here; their names can be compared with the The movie database base , in the plugin settings you should set the Russian language. In this case, we get a description of the film, the actors and the main trailer. A trailer is like a prelude to sex, in my opinion, it is possible without it, but somehow without a soul or something.

Flashback. Previously, the choice (in the system there are more than or equal to two people) from new films happened like this, switching on, rewinding, next switching on, rewinding ... Sometimes the choice of a movie was delayed and the show was canceled altogether. The trailer, often, is the whole relish of the film. I can describe the feeling of being late for a session in the cinema and skipping trailers with just the word HARAM. Although I must admit, I’m a fan of going to the cinema, for a film about which I don’t know anything, sometimes such an approach gives a positive effect. But the cinema owns our attention to an exceptional degree. At home, modern man is immediately distracted by everything.

Also, the plugin's plus is the emerging sorting by actors, years, genres, etc. Another plugin for the Russian portal kinopoisk.ru is also available.

Summary of task number 4

Resolved, although I did not set it for myself when I bought Raspbery pi. There are nuances with a crooked file name, either rename the file here or in XBMC you can find the description corresponding to the movie manually.

Summary.

The post is dedicated to people who, having bought a Raspberry Pi, came across difficulties and put it on the table. I bought mine from a person who tried to realize a smart home on it, but gave up. I urge at least to leave him on the farm, as he is an “almost perfect media player”. When setting up the system, I never connected to it via ssh, did not connect a keyboard or mouse, which indicates a certain completeness of the solution. This is available to anyone, not a fan or geek. I didn’t have time to talk about “cool tricks” that were unnecessary for me: airplay support, smartphone control, the ability to throw YouTube links, video photos to a media player, etc. It seemed to me that this solution is close to expensive commercial. The player is not perfect and perhaps roughness will reveal itself a little later, but I will not leave my previous omnivorous Iconbit player as a backup.
A small video addition.



PS: Unfortunately, the ending had to be cut out of the video at the request of the copyright holders.