[mythtv-users] Raspberry Pi frontend via Raspbmc - first try report

[Nick Rout]

I have a Raspberry Pi (RPi) with 256M Ram (the subsequent model comes with
512M)

There has been considerable debate about whether this device can act as a
mythtv frontend. The various pros, cons and debates seem to be:

1. Generally underpowered;

2. No hardware MPEG2 decoding (now fixable for a paltry sum);

3. Very active development of XBMC on it (2 or 3 distros specialising in
this);

4. No mythtv support for OpenMAX video decoding (which is what you need to
use to get hardware accelerated video on the RPi), but XBMC supports this;

5. Probably insufficient RAM for most myth themes, so XBMC with the new PVR
plugins is possibly a better bet.;

My situation is mythtv-0.25 backend on an x86 box, 2 HDHR dual tuners
recording DVB-T broadcast in h.264 at 1080i and 576i resolutions.
(Therefore I don't strictly need the mpeg2 decoder licence for this
purpose).

Being a curious soul I installed the latest Raspbmc version a few nights
ago and today configured the PVR client for mythtv. I haven't used it
extensively but can say this (these points are in no particular order):

1. It works for the most part, but there is clearly not enough RAM and
Raspbmc doesn't enable any swap by default. I will enable a swap file when
I remember how and see if it makes a difference. Swap will be pretty slow
on an SD card though I think. It would be interesting to get my hands on a
512M Rpi for comparison.

2. Deinterlacing is not flash. I believe the raspbmc developer is working
on this.

3. It crashes out of xbmc every now and then, usually when trying to play
back a 1080i programme.

4. Moving around the mythtv pvr plugin screens is painfully slow;

5. I managed to generate fairly reliable crashes by entering the pvr mythtv
plugin screens before the plugin had properly initialised (which takes some
time and seems to get quite a bit of epg and other info from the backend.

6. Although not directly related to myth, the HDMI-CEC hardware on the RPI
seems to work with my panasonic tv and it's remote. Hell the whole Rpi is
cheaper than the Pulse Eight HDMI-CEC adaptor!

7. When it doesn't crash it renders the recorded TV files well enough and
without significant breaking of sweat, subject to the need to improve the
deinterlacing as mentioned above.

All in all I would have to say "shows promise, needs work".

I am not trying to start a huge debate or advocate for low power low memory
arm frontends to be a universal solution, but there has been regular
discussions on here about whether it could work as a frontend, so I wanted
to post this report. I would give a qualified "yes".

There has been a convergence here of the maturity of the XBMC PVR addon,
the release of MPEG2 decoding licenses by RPi, and the hard work of
developers of both mythtv and XBMC.
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