XBMC Running On Raspberry Pi

jones_supa writes "The Raspberry Pi Foundation has a news release about Raspberry Pi running XBMC smoothly, turning the board into a media center the size of deck of cards. Looking at Pi's low price, small size and hardware 1080p support, this could make an interesting HTPC project. Included is a video demonstration of the setup. For this to be possible, the XBMC team created a customized version that targets the beefier Raspberry Pi model."

Comments

Impressive hardware

[Anonymous Coward]

The big news is that the GPU on the Raspberry Pi doubles the performance the iPhone 4S -- on a board that costs a fraction of the iPhone. Now that's impressive.

Re:Impressive hardware

[ifrag]

Is it the ability to display a UI, or the ability to decode H.264 at that resolution

For that matter, which H.264 profile? Is it just CBP (Constrained Baseline Profile) or BP? If it can decode the same H.264 my Windows box does, then it would be quite impressive, but I just don't see how that would be possible at this price and current generation hardware.

Re:Impressive hardware

[Rakishi]

And probably sucks up five times the power that the iphone GPU does. Amazing what you can do when you don't have to deal with trying to get 7 hours of run time out of a 5watt-hour battery.

Re:Impressive hardware

[c 0xFF]

Back of the envelope calculations:

The iPhone 4 battery is 5.25 Whr at 3.7V. The Raspberry Pi draws 300mA peak. Let's be pessimistic and assume that's the constant draw for XBMC video decoding. At 5V, that's 1.5W, which will give about 3.5 hrs of battery life. I'd bet you'd actually see closer to 4 hours in real-life tests. SD or 720p video would probably see even lower power consumption.

So, how does the iPhone do? Real-world examinations of Apple's claim of "up to 10 hours" for playing video are hard to find. Apple's tests were done with a video from iTunes: 640×480 resolution, so this is hardly a fair comparison. PCWorld found the life to be about 6 hours for 720p video, but that includes the power from the display (at full brightness) and wifi. (The iPhone has had battery life issues because of an OS problem, just to complicate things a bit).

So, the Raspberry Pi compares pretty well. I would love to see someone make a fair test here: play an HD video over HDMI for both devices and measure the power consumption. The Raspberry Pi will draw more current, probably, but not nearly as much as you might think.

x264 specs ain't everything

[afex]

while the specs for decoding video are AWESOME (especially for the price point), what I continually point out to people is that the low CPU can still kill you on some things. I have an NVIDIA ION / Atom D330 HTPC that can destroy the 40Mbps x264 killasample absolutely no problem, yet has trouble on some of the even medium-flashy skins for XBMC.

like i said, performance/dollar this thing is still awesome, but you do still have to think of the whole package.

Re:x264 specs ain't everything

[ackthpt]

while the specs for decoding video are AWESOME (especially for the price point), what I continually point out to people is that the low CPU can still kill you on some things. I have an NVIDIA ION / Atom D330 HTPC that can destroy the 40Mbps x264 killasample absolutely no problem, yet has trouble on some of the even medium-flashy skins for XBMC.

like i said, performance/dollar this thing is still awesome, but you do still have to think of the whole package.

It's mouthwatering .. waiting is the hard part.. I want one in my car, at my desk, at work, everywhere. Do you think they'll sell these as a six pack? :)