First commercial HTPC "Slice" based on XBMC-Raspberry-Pi is launched

[smnrock]

There are actually two bottlenecks. highly compressed for sized YIFY's movies and high data bandwidth moviles like NLUPPER's.
YIFY's are highly compressed for size, ~1.4GB so they need less IO bandwidth but very high cpu to decode. a typical dual core celeron will max out decoding these movies.
on the other hand NLUPPER's releases are ~10GB and use very less compression and filters. so they use less CPU but need faster storage. I once played rango movie full hd and high bandwidth on a allwinner 1GHz chinese tablet without any problem. so it all depends upon how good are the codes for the particular processor. rpi's codecs and BSP (board support package) are not open source.

bottomline is that choosing correct pirated source helps a lot

if you look around the GPU capability of RPI, you will know there is no issues with that and xbmc is smooth enough mostly is because of RPI's GPU. The problem occurs mostly when 5.1 audio/DTS decoding. May be the same reason i've not faced any of the theories you are talking here. Also i must mention my files are accessed using NFS from wdmycloud which is connected via LAN. So there is no bottleneck here as well. Again i'm talking all practical if you want me to test some files, i'm happy to download, test and post the results for you.... after all i dont know how i can efficiently use my unlimited 35mbps fiber connection

 

[booo]

@booo , I do not wish to nitpick, but Raspberry Pi B+ is available for 2900/- at RSDelivers , which is comparable to USD 48.88 (2966 INR) for AllWinner board here at AliExpress.

The key word here in this comparison is "SATA". if you want to use internal sata drive along with the board, you save some money by not buying USB HDD. and SATA bus gives you around 60MBps throughput compared to 12MBps on a USB2.0 (rpi's usb)
and bananapi has more powerful processor Allwinner A20 AMD Mali 400MP2 (read dualcore) with 1G RAM. so the VFM with banana pi is much more.

you will know there is no issues with that and xbmc is smooth enough mostly is because of RPI's GPU

On the other hand, it seems xbmc is still not matured on CedarX and probably that is the reason for the jitters and lag. the dev site clearly states that http://linux-sunxi.org/XBMC

XBMC for linux on Allwinner devices is NOT READY FOR USE!

This is only a hack intended for developers and curious users at the moment. Don't expect it to work as you want it! Hardware is capable to make it run quite good in the future, but software and drivers are not ready yet. The sunxi-community is working towards making a smooth XBMC experience possible.

If you want to help developing the needed components to have a stable XBMC in the future, join the irc and mailing list. Developers wanted!

 

[rahuljawale]

hmm. But can these CPUs, RPi and AllWinner , make full use of the I/O bandwidth?

 

[avi]

^depends on your usage

 

[booo]

^well faster IO is always better. you can even install the OS on the sata instead of sdcard since sdcard is also slower compared to SATA. if you've ever done some perf testing, its always the IO that is slower compared to CPU.

for example, if you are watching a H264 movie. even though the its very taxing on the CPU; the cpu is always waiting for the IO to happen. simply put, the ratio between the speeds of CPU and IO is usually in the order of >100.