Latest revision as of 07:29, 28 June 2018

Just in case it isn't obvious from the changes I've made to the article - the Pi 2 model B (has an ethernet NIC) is a great front end. £50 or less will get you a kit on Amazon etc with a HDMI lead, WiFi dongle (careful with this though for HD - throughput might not be good enough), case, SD card and power supply/wall wart.

Openelec isn't perfect yet but damn close. I can now get a frontend up and running in less than 20 mins and that includes writing the SD card.

Yes, LibreElec generally performs better, can currently decode HEVC at 720P, which Myth cannot and LibreElec handles sound better. The main exception is page forward / backward, myth is faster at that (important for commercial skipping on recorded tv)

Just in case it's lost from git, here's the ALSA device definition for the IEC device which enables ALSA passthrough of AC3 and DTS on Raspbian

#
# Configuration for the bcm2835 soc found on RPi
#

<confdir:pcm/iec958.conf>

bcm2835.pcm.iec958.0 {
	@args [ CARD AES0 AES1 AES2 AES3 ]
	@args.CARD {
		type string
	}
	@args.AES0 {
		type integer
	}
	@args.AES1 {
		type integer
	}
	@args.AES2 {
		type integer
	}
	@args.AES3 {
		type integer
	}
	type hooks
	slave.pcm {
		type hw
		card $CARD
		device 1
	}
	hooks.0 {
		type ctl_elems
		hook_args [
			{
				interface PCM
				name "IEC958 Playback Default"
				lock true
				preserve true
				value [ $AES0 $AES1 $AES2 $AES3 ]
			}
		]
	}
}

Smoother playback (perhaps only UK)

I found that playback of HD content was juddering at a fairly regular interval. I forced the Pi to use 1080p @ 50Hz and this seems to have cured it. For me it was mode 31 from here:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/config-txt/video.md

--Spekulatius (talk) 07:27, 28 June 2018 (UTC) That is a really good tip. It not only made the playback smoother, but also fixed the fact that the sound disappeared for a few seconds, a few seconds after playback started.