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The Boxee Box: too free to live?The Boxee Box: too free to live?Posted Oct 20, 2012 20:41 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313)In reply to: The Boxee Box: too free to live? by arekm Parent article: The Boxee Box: too free to live?
Is your experience with the pi at 700MHz or at the higher (now supported) speeds? Since the higher speeds also increase the memory speed, you actually tend to get more performance than the clock increase alone would suggest.
Also, did your tests use the hardware accelerated video?
It will also be interesting to see what difference the added memory of the new version will make. Since most xbmc distros allocate 128M for video, this takes the memory available for the rest of the system from 128M to 384M.
It's nice to see what economies of scale can do for the costs of components :-)
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The Boxee Box: too free to live? Posted Oct 20, 2012 20:51 UTC (Sat) by arekm (subscriber, #4846) [Link]
Tested on 256MB version of raspbbery pi in june using openelec. Video was accelerated back then, not sure about menus and such.
I guess I should test it again.
The Boxee Box: too free to live? Posted Oct 20, 2012 22:28 UTC (Sat) by arekm (subscriber, #4846) [Link]
Made a test again with fresh Raspbmc distribution. My opinion still stands - raspberry pi is unusable as a generic (video especially) xbmc media player. It can't handle 1080p properly.
Full HD Posted Oct 21, 2012 16:41 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] Is that for Blu-ray movies? To be honest, my monitor doesn't have 1080 vertical pixels anyway (it's 1680x1050).
Full HD Posted Oct 21, 2012 16:47 UTC (Sun) by arekm (subscriber, #4846) [Link]
mkv file:
Format : Matroska
Video
Audio
Full HD Posted Oct 21, 2012 16:56 UTC (Sun) by GhePeU (subscriber, #56133) [Link]
It's probably not 1080p video's fault but a DTS audio issue: http://www.memetic.org/raspberry-pi-xbmc-and-dts-audio/
Latest Raspbmc should already use hard-float, so probably you'll need to overclock, which is now officially supported: http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/2008
Full HD Posted Oct 21, 2012 17:40 UTC (Sun) by arekm (subscriber, #4846) [Link]
Previous testing was done with 5.0 audio and DTS enabled settings. Receiver is capable of DTS of course (Pioneer VSX-920), so this isn't DTS issue.
I don't want to overclock pi. If I had to then it would be another reason to say that raspberry pi isn't good solution for home video player.
My popcornhour C-200 works much better (in terms of 'user experience') than xbmc on raspberry pi. The price range is very different though.
Full HD Posted Oct 21, 2012 21:28 UTC (Sun) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
> I don't want to overclock pi.
Overclocking beyond the manufacturers spec is a problem.
But the manufacturers have said that as long as the temp doesn't get too high, these clock rates are safe.
At that point, what's the difference between "overclocking" and the "turbo mode" that the latest Intel chips have where they can shut down some cores to run other cores at a higher clock rate and still keep within the thermal limits?
XBian mildly overclocks the pi in this safe, manufacturer approved way, and is significantly snappier than raspbmc.
That said, even Raspbmc is not significantly less responsive than my DVR when navigating around. I haven't tried doing so while a video is playing.
Full HD Posted Oct 21, 2012 21:35 UTC (Sun) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
putting it another way, if the timeing had been slightly different and the pi folks had released the pi as a 1GHz system with thermal limiting that would drop it's speed down to 700MHz if it got too hot instead of listing it as a 700MHz system that could be overclocked up to 1GHz as long as you didn't let it get too hot would you still feel the same way?
what's the difference between the two?
Full HD Posted Oct 22, 2012 18:34 UTC (Mon) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link]
> what's the difference between the two?
Overclocking is by definition not supported by the manufacturer.
I freely admit that I have not done any research on it, but just based on your comment, it sounds like the pi folks were having thermal dissipation issues at the higher frequencies. You can feel free to second-guess the engineers, but only at the risk of significant problems-- like melting the device, starting a fire, etc.
Full HD Posted Oct 22, 2012 18:48 UTC (Mon) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
> Overclocking is by definition not supported by the manufacturer.
This is supported by the manufacturer
http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/2008
Introducing turbo mode: up to 50% more performance for free
Since launch, we’ve supported overclocking and overvolting your Raspberry Pi by editing config.txt. Overvolting provided more overclocking headroom, but voided your warranty because we were concerned it would decrease the lifetime of the SoC; we set a sticky bit inside BCM2835 to allow us to spot boards which have been overvolted.
We’ve been doing a lot of work to understand the impact of voltage and temperature on lifetime, and are now able to offer a “turbo mode”, which dynamically enables overclock and overvolt under the control of a cpufreq driver, without affecting your warranty. We are happy that the combination of only applying turbo when busy, and limiting turbo when the BCM2835′s internal temperature reaches 85°C, means there will be no measurable reduction in the lifetime of your Raspberry Pi.
You can now choose from one of five overclock presets in raspi-config, the highest of which runs the ARM at 1GHz. The level of stable overclock you can achieve will depend on your specific Pi and on the quality of your power supply; we suggest that Quake 3 is a good stress test for checking if a particular level is completely stable. If you choose too high an overclock, your Pi may fail to boot, in which case holding down the shift key during boot up will disable the overclock for that boot, allowing you to select a lower level.
What does this mean? Comparing the new image with 1GHz turbo enabled, against the previous image at 700MHz, nbench reports 52% faster on integer, 64% faster on floating point and 55% faster on memory.
Full HD Posted Oct 23, 2012 22:51 UTC (Tue) by Lennie (subscriber, #49641) [Link]
Overclocking the Raspberry Pi is not only supported by the manufacturer, I believe they even have a driver which keeps an eye on the builtin temp. sensor.
The Boxee Box: too free to live? Posted Oct 22, 2012 15:35 UTC (Mon) by dashesy (subscriber, #74652) [Link]
What about BeagleBoard or a variant (it is open hardware BTW)? It is cheap, and sure is much more powerful than pi.
The Boxee Box: too free to live? Posted Oct 22, 2012 19:00 UTC (Mon) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
Beagleboard $150
600MHz Cortex A8 chip
Raspberry Pi $35
700-1000MHz ARM6 chip
are you sure the beagleboard is 'much more powerful' than the pi?
it's possible that the video acceleration of the beagleboard is better than the pi. I don't know a good way to look that up.
The Boxee Box: too free to live? Posted Oct 22, 2012 19:30 UTC (Mon) by dashesy (subscriber, #74652) [Link]
Maybe the additional DSP+GPU may help:
TMS320C64x+ DSP for accelerated video and audio decoding, and an Imagination Technologies PowerVR SGX530 GPU. It also says (520 MHz up to 720p @30 fps) for DSP but then a combination of CPU+DSP maybe able to handle higher resolutions.
The Boxee Box: too free to live? Posted Oct 22, 2012 20:26 UTC (Mon) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
The GPU on the pi is able to drive a 1080p@60hz display. You can play video at this resolution if you are using the hardware codec support.
Unfortunantly this does require a binary blob driver loaded by the boot process to work, but while this isn't good, it's no worse than anything else in the space.
The Boxee Box: too free to live? Posted Oct 22, 2012 20:06 UTC (Mon) by GhePeU (subscriber, #56133) [Link]
IIRC the original BeagleBoard can't even drive a monitor at that resolution. There's a newer Beagleboard version, the BeagleBoard XM (149 USD):
1 GHz Cortex A8
And it still doesn't support 1080p video, at best it can do 720p.
A Pandaboard ES can play 1080p video (I've got one on my desktop now), but it costs ~180USD. It's a wholly different board, however, dual-core Cortex A9 1.2GHz with 1 GB LP-DDR2, 802.11 b/g/n, 10/100 Ethernet, Bluetooth v2.1 EDR, HDMI, DVI-D... it's also very well supported for now, the latest drivers release supports Wayland (!).
The Odroid-X is another alternative, it costs about 50 USD less than a Pandaboard (no WiFi or Bluetooth however) and has a quad-core Exynos4412 Cortex A9 1.4 GHz, but I don't think HD video acceleration is working on Linux at the moment.
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