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extends: post.liquid title: Raspberry Pi - Day 2 date: 06 Jul 2012 13:20:00 +0200 path: /:year/:month/:day/raspberry-pi-day-two

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 thats 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.