[mythtv-users] Raspberry Pi now ships with 512MB RAM

[Nick Rout]

On Thu, Oct 18, 2012 at 9:29 AM, tortise <tortise at paradise.net.nz> wrote:
> On 18/10/2012 6:59 a.m., Jay Ashworth wrote:
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>>>
>>> From: "Michael T. Dean" <mtdean at thirdcontact.com>
>>
>>
>>> The post I quoted and agreed with (that you've cut out) was one that
>>> said it's not a good idea to have a huge backend transcoding every
>>> single recording from MPEG-2 (or whatever) to H.264 just so you can
>>> use an RPi frontend with its built-in hardware H.264 decoder.
>>
>> [...]
>>>
>>> And, yes, a system that's transcoding everything to H.264 (versus
>>> storing it in its native recording format) does make for an extremely
>>> power hungry system.
>>
>>
>> Ah.  Got it.
>>
>> Then I'll go back to agreeing with you about everything. (Though in fact,
>> if
>> you have 12 backends, you would at least get to amortize that transcoding
>> over
>> more clients... ;-)
>>
>> Should I assume we have no way to utilize hardware assist to transcode,
>> GPUs
>> or the like?
>>
>> Cheers,
>> -- jra
>
>
> Recalling the R'Pis also can encode H264, makes me wonder if a pi might be
> recruited on a back end (?Lo power) to encode / transcode?
>
> If it were to be then I expect it would be best to interface via usb,
> because in any event the Ethernet interface is connected internally on the
> Pi thru USB.


It's pretty clear from a bit of googling that the software to do h264
encoding on the RPi is not particularly mature or stable, but the
posts are also pretty confusing because many people are trying to
encode from webcams, as opposed to a stream already encoded as
something else.

I don't think your USB idea is a runner, the RPi is a USB host AFAIK.
A network socket accepting decoded YUV frames would be better I would
have thought, but the bandwidth would be quite high.

Or are you thinking of decoding AND encoding on the RPi?

But really, where is all this going? If you want to do mass
transcoding of every dang file on your system, you are doing something
wrong. Also what is the point of using one RPi to encode to h.264, and
then another to render it on your screen? Far better IMHO to leverage
a well powered backend and the maturing Services API of mythtv.

In short, if you want to use RPi, (1) if your broadcast TV is h264, it
should work (2) if your broadcast TV is mpeg2, it should work with the
addition of a GBP2.40 codec license. (3) if you have xvid material it
is probably SD and the RPi will probably decode it in cpu.

>
>
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