I've heard lots of hype over the super cheap tiny Raspberry Pi PCs, especially how they can turn an old "dumb" HDTV into a smart media center TV, so I shelled out $60 for the latest and greatest RPi 3b.
Many things are my own fault of not doing enough research, like Netflix - I figured that since my laptop was running Ubuntu Linux, and it can play Netflix on Chromium just fine, that surely the RPi running Linux and Chromium would be able to as well. But apparently for some DRM/decoding reasons that I don't fully understand, it doesn't work at all out of the box, and even with a very recent new Widevine-support hack that manages to get it working, it struggles to play back even SD video at anything above 10fps, which does not make for a great viewing experience.
And other things are the fault of the research itself being simply wrong - one of the reasons I opted to buy it was for a cheap Airplay server - tons of Google results tell me that the RPi supports "RPlay", which allows you to mirror your iDevice's screen onto the RPi. No it doesn't. I don't know why there's so many websites telling you how this works, because on every single one, there's about a hundred comments explaining how and why it doesn't, at all. But of course, I only read the comments after I found out it doesn't work.
Online video like Youtube, sports streaming, movie streaming, is hit-and-miss. Sometimes you'll find a site that manages to play at 24fps or better, like some online movie streaming sites, but Youtube and most sports sites only work in small mode. As soon as you make them full screen, they go all choppy, again failing to reach even above 10fps. A fault of not being able to use the GPU HW acceleration, although supposedly the included Chromium plugin is supposed to fix that, it doesn't appear to.
Well at least it should be able to play back locally available video files over the network, right? Even that is a bit of a pain. I'm old school, I like to browse to the file in a file browser, and play it in a media player like VLC. I was astonished that even VLC doesn't really work on the RPi, although I should have seen that coming - VLC famously does not use HW acceleration for video playback, and that means it really sucks on the RPi.
Really you only have 3 options for viewing video on the RPi - the included "OMXPlayer", a commandline-only option that gets you full screen video, no UI whatsoever, and 4 keyboard commands - Kodi, the famous media center software, does make great use of HW acceleration and is really the only viable option for playing local media files, but it's a heavyweight app with a ton of bloat - and Plex, a server/client solution that requires a second server on another PC to serve up all your media files, and often transcode them on the fly, which is far from ideal.
I mean I don't know what I expected for $60, but with all the hype surrounding this thing as being a great media center PC, I thought it would be better than this. Oh well, maybe others will learn from my lesson.
July 12, 2017 at 09:55PM
