Raspberry Pi - Day 2
Yesterday night I blogged about my first experience with the Raspberry Pi (forgive me the horrible typo in the title).
I made three notes on what's next:
- I need to check out rpi-update, for updating the firmware.
- Get video playing done right. I did not fully test it, but the video in the second image above was quiet slow.
- I want xbmc to run on my Raspberry Pi, because that’s what I bought it for: it should become my media computer in the living room.
rpi-update
This is not needed on archlinuxarm, because there i a raspberrypi-firmware in the
alarm repo
video playing
I first installed the default mplayer-package, but video playing was horribly
slow, mp3 playing worked quite ok.
Again, @bl2nk to the rescue: Use omxplayer instead. Get the binary package or just build it yourself.
Works like a charm and does not even require a running X environment. Just execute the following over your always-open ssh connection:
omxplayer -ohdmi -p video.mp4
and use Left, Right and Space for controlling. Playing the 720p version of Fight Club works now.
xbmc
There is no package for archlinuxarm (yet?), so I did not test it for now. There are specific Raspberry Pi distributions linked in the xbmc wiki. I definitely need another SD card for this. :D
other things.
Beside the 3 points mentioned above I got redis compiled and running on the Pi! Well, it does not make sense to use a in-memory database on a computer with just 256 MB of RAM (and to be precise, right now I can only use half of that, the other half is used for the GPU). But as I really like the project, I did this for the fun.
See the amazing benchmark results in a gist.