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RaspberryPi And Hardware Video Playback

Posted by artodeto on

Sadly but true, the local hamburg public transport stops "transporting" at half past one on weekdays, so i decided to watch the Fnord News Show at home.

Nothing special so far but there is this tiny raspberrypi near my full hd screen. I decided boot up the pi, start notion and wanted to watch the stream "on big screen".
Well, chromium was more a slideshow, mplayer was working but only in a slide show or with tiny video size (by the way, the load was way to high for a single core machine). A quick search on the web and i found thread. This thread links to a page called Hardware-accelerated video playback on the Raspberry Pi. To keep it short, mplayer isn't shipped with a hardware support, so simple install omxplayer, open your stream and you get full hd and hardware decoded video playback.

First Impression Of RaspberryPi

Posted by artodeto on

General

So after a while of borrowing multiply pi's, i've managed to buy one. Of course the shipment was delayed so it arrived at a week full of no time. Finally, i prepared all and started the installation, of course an arch linux (like the guy in the advertisement, "what else?" ;-)). The installation was quite easy, i struggeld a bit with the resizing of my partitions. The magic hint, resizes the extended partition first, then you are able to resize the root partition and everything is fine.

After that, i've browsed through the available packages and started setting up the tiny beast. Writing about window managers is a short one, don't do fancy stuff. Notion is working, openbox and fluxbox also. Of course xbmc is running like a charm. But xfce4 and lxde are a bit to much for the little arm. Kde is working better than expected but like chromium, it is far away from running smooth. A nice howto about installing xfce4 on arm arch linux can be found here. Some general beginner tutorials about different raspberry pi distributions can be found here.

What about using known software? Well, you can but keep in mind, it is an arm cpu under the hood. Midori is currently my first choice for browsing the web. If i need something with a gui, pcmanfm is performing well on the pi. Have some minutes left? Read this nice introduction about the desktop world of the raspberry pi.

Other Operation Systems Then Linux

Talking about the upcomming and possible shooting star firefox os, i can only write that i havn't tried it so far. There is a bunch of tutorials out there, like this, that. A list of possible alternative operation systems for the pi can be found here.

What To Do Now?

Well, first i want to try out the media center suitability of the little pi. I like the idea to control the xbmc via an android mobile. I also want to compare xbmc with openELEC. And for the far away future, i want to build zfs on linux on this little box (why?, of course because i can :-D). A git server is also and always an option, lets see. Privoxy, openVPN, tor, the list is getting longer the more i think about it :-).

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