Raspbmc versus OpenELEC
Since I bought a Raspberry PI from http://12geeks.com/ in Singapore, I was impressed when Michael Cheng showed me at http://hackerspace.sg/ you can play back videos with it.
Yes! A way to easily watch my downloads on a big screen, which was basically impossible to do on an Apple TV.
First I tried Raspbmc when Michael was using. IIUC it's a port of XMBC 12.2 "Frodo" to the PI. I quickly found a few issues:
- UI is a bit crap. Why are pictures, movies and TV shows seperated? The mind boggles.
- IOS7 doesn't work
- No bug tracker, only the dreaded Web forum
- Fails to pick up .srt subtitle, e.g. foo_eng.srt isn't found from foo_.mp4
- When I try playback videos on my Samsung UE46C6530 TV, the TV loses signal, later solved by a re-install
- Zeroconf fails to show Web sites, have to add them manually
Later I found http://openelec.tv/ prompted by a tweet.
Open Embedded Linux Entertainment Center (OpenELEC) at least has a decent github powered issue tracker. Nonetheless both raspbmc and OpenELEC rely on XBMC. Nonetheless OpenELEC's support / IRC channel seems much healthier than the Raspbmc project.
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Annoyingly the Web interface isn't enabled by default, so I had to plug in a USB mouse instead of controlling it from my iPhone
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HDMI CEC works with my Samsung UE46C6530 TV nicely. Not sure why Raspbmc fell short here.
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Plugging in a USB stick in the top port causes the PI to reboot, same as Raspbmc
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Zeroconf does not work like Raspbmc, Web sites aren't shown but can by manually added in the horrible UI
OpenELEC:~ # avahi-browse -at | grep http
- eth0 IPv4 XBMC (OpenELEC) _http._tcp local
- eth0 IPv4 x220 _http._tcp local
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Doesn't automatically mount ExFAT formatted USB sticks. I found a fix in a pull but I have no idea when it will be deployed or how to use this particular revision
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For subtitles, I've discovered the amazing XBMC subtitles that goes off and downloads the subtitles
Anyway, both projects stem from XBMC which has a ton of usability issues, however I really like their potential. I wish Chromecast was better supported, but after looking at it briefly, you get the same functionality by just pointing XBMC to the content as suggested in this JSONRPC post.
I can't help but think though, if it was easier to connect my laptop or desktop to my big screen TV, it would probably be a better solution overall. Basically I like to flick through my photo collection at lightning speed. You need SSD, fast CPU, a suckless image viewer and the latest codec support like that for WebP. Nonethless I still think the PI presents a pretty good low cost dedicated media solution. It's better than the Apple TV, if you can live without Airplay Mirroring (which is so damn nice tbh).