Streaming BD rips

[skoal74]

I just received my RPi last week and having been playing with it over the past few days. Just wanted to tap the community's experience for advice. I have a full blu ray rips I on a WHSv1 that I currently stream to my basement theater/projector via a Popcorn hour C-200. I'm looking to use the rpi as a media streamer for 2 other rooms in the house.

I have tried the latest images of XBian, Openelec and Raspbmc and have been unable to stream a full bitrate BD mkv successfully across to the rpi. I have test clips without audio streams (e.g. Birds, Casino Royale), so I know it's not that. I have the RPi plugged into the same switch as my PCH, and the RPi buffers every 3-4 seconds while the PCH using SMB has no problem.

I've tried overclocking up to 900 and still am unsucessful.

Two questions:
1. Has anyone been successful streaming full bitrate BD Rips over a wired network? I thought I'd seen people being successful, but wasn't sure of the setup.
2. If yes, what networking protocol did you use? I'm using SMB right now, but will add NFS to my WHS if others have been more successful with that.

Any tips/advice would be great.

Thanks!

[dom]

Do you have audio passthrough enabled? (and a TV/receiver that can decode DTS/AC3 audio)

If so, then it is possible. I'd start with omxplayer as that has less overhead than xbmc. Streaming from nfs should be fine with a good network. (SMB has more overhead).

If you don't have audio passthough then you are unlikely to succeed.

(I did watch a whole 1:1 Blu-Ray rip in omxplayer with software DTS audio decode a while back, without glitches. It did require a significant overclock. I didn't succeed with xbmc.
I'm hopeful there will be a way of buying licences for DTS and AC3 to be decoded on GPU soon. That should make what you want possible without audio passthrough).

[tomolac]

I know this is a bit old but I've been looking into this too.
The problem is that Bluray rips are around 30Mbyte/s, the rasperberry pi's Ethernet controller can do 12.5Mbyte/s, so there's simly no way to get it to play over the inbuilt usb Ethernet adapter.
All though the graphics processor is said to be able to do it, it seems completely wasted as the processor seem unable to handle the data transfer alone. I've tried a 300mbitp/s wifi adapter but this seems to make things worse as files that play other ethernet have troble with over wifi, its not a signal problem as if its plugged into my htpc next to the pi it plays the rips fine.
I've been tempted to see if a usb to gigabit ethernet adapter might work, as usb 2.0 does have a max speed rating of 450mbit/s but am dubious about spending yet more money on the pi as I have no idea if it will work and I've wasted enough money on this all ready

[dom]

I know this is a bit old but I've been looking into this too.
The problem is that Bluray rips are around 30Mbyte/s, the rasperberry pi's Ethernet controller can do 12.5Mbyte/s, so there's simly no way to get it to play over the inbuilt usb Ethernet adapter.

No. Blu-Ray is around 40Mbits/s or 5MBytes/s , so it is possible.
(I have watched a number of Blu-Ray rips on Pi).

[davorin]

See here for some performance tests of ethernet and various types of BluRay files:

http://www.uclinux.net/blog.html

Video rate is no problem at all....if your receiver/tv can't decode audio then you have following options:

- Use AC3/PCM audio if it is available
- Recode audio to AC3
- Strip off all unnecessary audio streams
- Use NFS for less CPU usage


cheers
richard

[bigdavethehorn]

(I have watched a number of Blu-Ray rips on Pi).

I wonder Dom, are you using omxplayer or one of the XBMC distros?

[tomolac]

yeah sorry I did some further digging, I was just getting confused because mediainfo was capitalizing the first letter of everything making me see bytes every where
but it was the audio, the slight increase in cpu usage for full blu-ray + processing dts was just enough to push it over, I have a few 8mbit/s films with dts audio that play fine which is why I at first didn't think it was the audio, but I tried one without audio and it played well, can't test the ones I just made with ac3 audio though as the pi has just corrupted my sd card and I can't get the card going again...
but I've got my fingers crossed for the hardware decoding licenses, I held off buying the vc1 and mpeg due to not being able to play my blu-ray rips but now I'm waiting to see if the others come out and if they will maybe sell a pack until then dts is a bit much for the processor to handle while its dealing with a large network buffer too.

[dom]

I wonder Dom, are you using omxplayer or one of the XBMC distros?

You will need a receiver/TV that handles DTS passthrough for full BD rips. Software decode of DTS is probably too much.
I was using omxplayer. XBMC generally has more overhead.