Hi,
On 11/09/13 14:22, Ally Biggs wrote:
> No but if you haven't got a use for it I will have it :) i'm after a
> Model B for a XBMC setup
> how do they handle performance wise any lag during video playback
>
Powering the Pi should be easy; There are many car USB power adaptors
available. I would recommend you go for a quality, brand-name supply as
I found my Pis become really crashy if you use a cheap mains PSU. I
wouldn't see any reason why a DC PSU would be any different. If you are
using an ignition-switched power source, it might be worth including a
startup-delay timer in the power circuit so the power glitch when you
crank the engine doesn't crash the Pi.
All the following observations were made using the OpenELEC appliance
build of XBMC approaching a year ago. I found no issues with playback
integrity or frame rate but I did note that my Pi wouldn't play up to
50% of my collection. I built a new OpenELEC box using the native Fusion
build on an x86-based AMD Fusion board. That plays every file in my
collection. I concluded that the cause of this discrepancy was that many
of the codecs the files used didn't have ARM ports so the Pi could never
play them. Every codec I found has an x86 port. Whilst the video played
fine (without an MPEG 2 hardware key on the Pi) the user interface fared
badly whenever the Pi got busy and became so laggy when doing things
like media indexing it was unusable.
Note that the following observation was made on original (256MB) Pis
rather that the newer (512MB) so things may be better now. I have a
large media collection (of the order of 27,000 music tracks and 1TB of
video). I found the experience of indexing them on the Pi to be painful.
It took 3 days to index my collection and needed at least 2 power-off
reboots, often causing database corruption, when it crashed from running
out of resources. My Fusion board indexes the whole collection in a
matter of minutes and the user interface and video playback are rock
solid while it's doing so.
The problem with the Pi seemed to be more related to the media database
engine than the video performance. The Pi's CPU is of the order of a
700MHz single core. The Fusion is a 1.6 GHz dual core but there is more
to it than that. The Pi averaged CPU load about 90% ; The Fusion runs at
about 7%. (90% of 700 MHz is a lot more cycles than 7% of 2x1600MHz).
The Fusion also has 4GB or RAM but uses less than the Pi has so I'm not
sure this is relevant.
I bought my Pi to use as a media player but I ended up ditching it out
of frustration.
Bests,
Paul.
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