Raspberry Pi as a MediaDirector

[phenigma]

Hey all!

Well, it's been over 2.5 years since I started down this journey of trying to support the rpi as a media director.  There have been trials and tribulations and breaks of many weeks between development commits.  I have pulled my hair out and re-grown it twice over already.   

I can say that now I am confident in the 'alpha' status of the rpi as a Media Director.  The wiki details the methods you need to follow to implement an rpi as a standard MD right now.  I am working hard to implement qorbiter based media directors and the rpi is the test bed for that, at the moment.

If you have a raspberry pi and want to get involved in testing then I'd love to hear your feedback in irc at #linuxmce or #linuxmce-dev.  Visit the wiki at: http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php?title=RaspberryPi to learn how to setup an rpi MD.

Media playback is working with an lmce OMX_Player device to control omxplayer.  The Photo Screen Saver is working.  Please realize that using the rpi as an MD is not the quickest.  Orbiter and Photo Screen Saver take all of the resources of the rpi and not much else is possible.  qOrbiter will open up many possibilities and is being worked on extensively.

Enjoy your LMCE experience and let me know what your experiences are, I'll try to help any way I can.

J.

[purps]

This is really exciting. Looking forward to testing it.

Cheers,
Matt.

[RayBe]

I have been testing the raspberrypi as MD for some time now and am loving every second of it.
Phenigma has been doing a awesome job.
imho the rPi has great potential with CEC, its GPIO pins and all the aditional boards one can get for it.
The Pi has been great so far, sometimes it has a hickup in that it doesn't close the playing vid, but all in all, awesome!
No noise what so ever very low power.
Phenigma, thanks so far!

br,
Raymond

[phenigma]

Thanks for all the testing Raybe!

J.

[G.I.R.]

Really Great News!!!

Thank You for developping and all the work!
Can't wait to try it and  replace the noisy zotac zbox with it.

But first i have to get a newer raspberry and switch to use the 12.04 installation.

[purps]

I have been testing the raspberrypi as MD for some time now and am loving every second of it.
Phenigma has been doing a awesome job.
imho the rPi has great potential with CEC, its GPIO pins and all the aditional boards one can get for it.
The Pi has been great so far, sometimes it has a hickup in that it doesn't close the playing vid, but all in all, awesome!
No noise what so ever very low power.
Phenigma, thanks so far!

br,
Raymond

Now I am even MORE excited 1004 had better watch out.

[RayBe]

Thanks for all the testing Raybe!

J.

You are very much welcome!, keep em coming
Thanks for making this all possible!

br,
Raymond

[dextaslab]

Has anyone tried this using the Banana PI? http://www.bananapi.org/p/product.html
1GB RAM, 1GHZ CPU and 1Gb NIC would help with some performance issues. I believe it's compatible, just more expensive.
With the sata port you could almost use it as a core.

Cheers

[Esperanto]

Has anyone tried this using the Banana PI? http://www.bananapi.org/p/product.html
1GB RAM, 1GHZ CPU and 1Gb NIC would help with some performance issues. I believe it's compatible, just more expensive.

Yes. It's on the list: Phenigma has one. However the vdpau support is not feature complete yet: http://linux-sunxi.org/Cedrus#Supported_codec_matrix

so if someone capable of extending that please do....

[phenigma]

I would love to support the bpi as an MD, however the sheer amount of effort required to support new media players can be overwhelming.  The LMCE MPlayer_Player device is not written as a full player, it is only supported as a fallback for certain media types from the Xine_Player.

Currently the only playback in HD I can get is with mplayer2.  If the vdpau implementation works with libxine2 then we're laughing.  Until then the amount of work to support media playback is large.

That being said.  I am not abandoning the possibility.  But I also don't have time to test every permutation of options for playback out there.  So, here's what you guys need to do: Find a way to playback accelerated hd with any xine frontend (console player may be the best option), and document what you did.  This can be done from either the raspbian image or the lubuntu image.  It's an armv7 device so in the long run we're looking at ubuntu as all the raspbian packages are built for armv6 and run slower than equivalent armv7 packages.

CEC control is not yet possible on the bpi, it *is* possible but no one has done the firmware end to have it supported, nothing we can really do there.

With working A/V this little guy is a contender and I would support it.  Until then I have other bugs and development that is more pressing.  Wandboard and Cu-Box are both contenders, but both have A/V issues with the quad core models, that's a show stopper again.

J.

[RayBe]

After doing a update & upgrade (Update 29544) the rPi stopped a few times during media playback, i had to start the media again to get it going, after a while, nothing did play and the photo-screensaver wasn't working either.
The log showed me that orbiter had died (after 50 attemts to restart).

I rebuilded the MD with no luck, so i removed the MD, updated&&upgraded, ran /usr/pluto/bin/Diskless_CreateTBZ.sh (all just to be sure i was at the latest) and booted the Pi, it does its setup as normal, but then after orbiter is regenerated, i get a black screen with a mouse cursor and it won't go any further.

Does anyone know what could cause this or has a clue how to debug this?
It was working great before i updated, thanks a lot.

br,
Raymond

[phenigma]

No idea what is up.  No issues here.  apt-cache policy pluto-orbiter just to be sure.

J.

[RayBe]

Thanks for looking into it.

Code: [Select]

root@moon293:~# apt-cache policy pluto-orbiter
pluto-orbiter:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: 2.0.0.46.14090829353
  Version table:
     2.0.0.46.14090829353 0
        500 http://deb.linuxmce.org/raspbian/ wheezy/main armhf Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

Seems like it's not installed, which is very strange to me because it did before.
This is on the newly installed rPi-MD, after update&&upgrading my core and running /usr/pluto/bin/Diskless_CreateTBZ.sh
I did not recreate the SD-card, as this was at your latest content.

br,
Raymond

[RayBe]

today i got a little time and tried:

Code: [Select]

root@moon293:~# apt-get install pluto-orbiter
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  pluto-orbiter
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 9340 kB of archives.
After this operation, 27.7 MB of additional disk space will be used.
WARNING: The following packages cannot be authenticated!
  pluto-orbiter
Authentication warning overridden.
Get:1 http://deb.linuxmce.org/raspbian/ wheezy/main pluto-orbiter armhf 2.0.0.46.14090829353 [9340 kB]
Fetched 9340 kB in 12s (721 kB/s)                                                                                               
Selecting previously unselected package pluto-orbiter.
(Reading database ... 51653 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking pluto-orbiter (from .../pluto-orbiter_2.0.0.46.14090829353_armhf.deb) ...
Setting up pluto-orbiter (2.0.0.46.14090829353) ...
Upgrading from version '2.0.0.46.14090829353'. Not setting up X again

After a reboot everything is in working order again 
Still a bit puzzled as to why pluto-orbiter wasn't installed in the first place, after all this is a newly created rPi-MD, but happy that things are working now.
Phenigma, if you want to debug this strange behaviour and need any info from my system, you know you just have to ask , i am more than happy to help, thanks!

br,
Raymond

[phenigma]

Thanks for the testing!  I am running some experiments to figure out where the problem is, I'll update you when I have had a chance to do so.

J.