XBMC running on Raspberry Pi

[pixou80]

Hello,

an usb dvd drive does it work on xbmc with usb hub ? (sorry for my english)

[GroovyGrovesy]

Hi,

I have seen the video on youtube of XBMC running on the Pi and it seemd quite laggy, this would bug the hell out of me and XBMC would be the only reason for me to get a Pi so my question is;

Is this laggyness due to an early build or will the final release still be this laggy after optimisation?

Thanks

A

[abishur]

Could you link the video you're referring to?  The videos I've seen of XBMC has some slight delay between screens, but flawless on the video playback.

[milhouse]

GroovyGrovesy said:


I have seen the video on youtube of XBMC running on the Pi and it seemd quite laggy, this would bug the hell out of me and XBMC would be the only reason for me to get a Pi so my question is;


XBMC is the only reason you'd get a Pi? Wow.

I suppose you could just get one and see how it goes – after all we're only talking about $25 and if it doesn't work out for you, you can always give it away to a kid and maybe they can make more use of it.

[GroovyGrovesy]

Abishur said:


Could you link the video you're referring to?  The videos I've seen of XBMC has some slight delay between screens, but flawless on the video playback.



Yeah sorry I didn't mean the video playback, just the transitioning through the menus etc.

milhouse said:


GroovyGrovesy said:


I have seen the video on youtube of XBMC running on the Pi and it seemd quite laggy, this would bug the hell out of me and XBMC would be the only reason for me to get a Pi so my question is;


XBMC is the only reason you'd get a Pi? Wow.

I suppose you could just get one and see how it goes – after all we're only talking about $25 and if it doesn't work out for you, you can always give it away to a kid and maybe they can make more use of it.


Yep that's all I would want it for.  Not everyone who buys a Pi HAS to be a developer, some people just like to keep things simple.  And if a kid can make more use of it than me, then good luck to them, as long as they use it for what they intended too just like I plan to.

A

[abishur]

GroovyGrovesy said:


Abishur said:


Could you link the video you're referring to?  The videos I've seen of XBMC has some slight delay between screens, but flawless on the video playback.


Yeah sorry I didn't mean the video playback, just the transitioning through the menus etc.


I wouldn't worry about that, while there is some lag, it's not severe and that will rapidly diminish as the underlying OS has further improvements made to it to take better advantage of the underlying framework

[jell0zz]

I was wondering if XBMC is something that can only be booted separately or can it be booted up from let"s say a LINUX GUI.

So if I was running LINUX and I decided to watch a movie, would I have to shutdown the PI switch SD cards and reboot? Or could I for instance select it from LINUX and boot it that way?

Cheers,
Jelle

[asb]

jell0zz said:


I was wondering if XBMC is something that can only be booted separately or can it be booted up from let"s say a LINUX GUI.

So if I was running LINUX and I decided to watch a movie, would I have to shutdown the PI switch SD cards and reboot? Or could I for instance select it from LINUX and boot it that way?

Cheers,
Jelle


You might want to save RAM by shutting down the X server, but there's nothing stopping you from installing XBMC on your main SD card and using it from there. For instance it's not too hard to add in to the reference rootfs currently put up for download (packaging could be a little cleaner though).

[KeithSloan]

I got the impression that XBMC will need extra memory allocated to the GPU. Which is done at boot time. Therefore you are probably talking about a SD card prepared specially for XBMC so if you try an run something else it needs to run in only a small amount of memory. Also thats why only the two Linux's are being talked about. Things like Fedora and Debian will not run when the GPU gets the required memory.

[rmm200]

How much memory do you think Debian and Fedora need?  Debian can be installed in as little as 20meg, with a recommended minimum of 64meg.

[liamfraser280]

XBMC has to be run from the console rather than X and it will require 128MB/256MB of the ram for the GPU. This is easy though, you just have to copy the appropriate firmware files in the /boot directory. Takes 2 secs, then you just have to restart for that to take effect.

[KeithSloan]

rmm200 Debian memory see http://www.debian.org/releases.....04.html.en Obviously these are x86 numbers.

From the video's I've seen it does not run so fast on the pi when you try and do real stuff, like starting gimp etc. Thats when the GPU is given only 32MB, When it grabs 128MB I would expect it to be slower.

[rmm200]

Good link. That is where I got the numbers I used.

There is no documented way to give Pi less than 128m of the 256m that I have seen.

From Seneca:


For a 128M ARM / 128M GPU split (heavy graphics): cp /boot/arm128_start.elf /boot/start.elf
For a 192M ARM / 64M GPU split (general computing): cp /boot/arm192_start.elf /boot/start.elf
For a 224M ARM / 32M GPU split (simple display): cp /boot/arm224_start.elf /boot/start.elf

[igot6strings]

What is the status of this as it is right now?
I am looking to switch from my Boxee Box to XBMC and would love to use the Pi to make the transition. I understand its not final or anything of that nature but if you folks could give me a rough idea of where its at that'd be much appreciated.

[milhouse]

igot6strings said:


What is the status of this as it is right now?
I am looking to switch from my Boxee Box to XBMC and would love to use the Pi to make the transition. I understand its not final or anything of that nature but if you folks could give me a rough idea of where its at that'd be much appreciated.


I'm using a version of OpenELEC I built yesterday (r10935).

XBMC/OpenELEC, it's a work in progress so some things are good, some are bad.

SD playback is pretty good on the whole, but HD playback (particularly 1080p) a little glitchy (certainly with LG IPS225V monitor, it seems to renegotiate the HDMI handshake every 30 seconds or so, but not always). HD audio is not playable (hardly surprising) but presumably may work on "passthru".

The biggest problem by far is the fact that the XBMC GUI consumes close to 100% CPU all of the time (but not during playback), and this makes scanning media libraries near impossible as there is so little CPU free to work on the scan. Also, start a scan and the device soon becomes unresponsive necessitating a reboot.

The GUI (certainly in OpenELEC) is currently so sluggish that it rules out any possibility of the Ras-Pi being used as a media player as it's such an unpleasant, slow and glitchy experience (it often loses the ability to display cover and fan art, showing black rectangles instead) - hopefully this is high on the list of priorities to be fixed. I've tried all the dirty region fixes, but none have yet worked.

What has been achieved so far is certainly fantastic (thanks Gimli, Dom etc.), but it's a fair way from being usable and replacing any current media player you may have.

[LastSilmaril]

I've had some success with slightly later (10946 in particular) builds of OpenELEC, and some people have reported much nicer cpu usage pairing those with an earlier build of start.elf (haven't tried that yet). CPU usage remains high with the later builds, but not so much that, say, the RSS feed brings everything to a crawl (like with 10918). Scanning libraries can be problematic because of how much CPU xbmc takes up, but it's not impossible. I usually ssh in and kill the xbmc process any time it stays unresponsive for too long whilst scanning, and then proceed to restart the scan.
I haven't tried 1080p playback or decoding of dts or ac3 on the Pi itself though.
See the OpenELEC thread for more details and feedback.

[LastSilmaril]

CPU utilization also goes way, way down when playing sd or at least 720p video, too (somewhat counterintuitively until you think of how the pi works), so maybe scans would be smoother while video is being played...

[freedomotic]

Hello,
do you think is it possible to install also openjdk with good performances?

[milhouse]

Last night I built r10950 (latest start.elf etc.) and GUI usage in the GUI did sometimes reduce, but not always. When it was reduced, IMDB scans were able to run at a much improved rate, although eventually the system became totally responsive after about 15-30 minutes of scanning - I'm beginning to think this is due to the IMDB scraper having some sort of resource leakage that brings the system to it's knees requiring a reboot.

Unfortunately there seems to have been regressions in r10950 with respect to 1080p and various other content that played flawlessly with the r10935 build.

Will do another build later, but if the problem is in the add-on then there's probably little XBMC or OpenELEC can do about it.

[dom]

I found latest XBMC had very high CPU usage which led to stuttery playback.
I've fixed it by deleting my database (/root/.xbmc/userdata/Database).
It looks like they've changed the way thumbnails are stored in the database, and I'm guessing it's trying to retroactively convert the database (which hasn't completed in a couple of hours).
I think deleting database and recreating is the way forward.

[gavinlew]

Im just compiling the latest revision of OpenELEC , currently my first Pi is running build 10695 and most of the reported issues do not affect my install.

CPU is approx 85% on the menus, but I can happily scan a media folder ~ 350films , and a Music folder ~4000 folders and it has not crashed or caused any problems with the Pi. All album art/fan art displays correctly.

Im using TCPIP sockets to control OpenELEC (using XBMC Remote under Android) , the only things connected to the Pi are Ethernet/HDMI and Power.

Cheers.

G