Multimedia on the Raspberry Pi with omxplayer - Page 3
In Operation
As part of our tests, we tried omxplayer with a wide
variety of different video files encoded with varying video and audio
codecs, resolutions, and bitrates. The Pi's GPU made light work of the
vast majority of files we tried with smooth playback and no video
tearing evident. Video tearing has, in the past, been a particular
bugbear for many Linux users, so to see this was not an issue for the
Pi is a welcome relief.
The screenshot below shows the load on the Raspberry Pi when
playing a 720p video encoded with the H264 MPEG-4 AVC video codec and
the free loseless audio codec (FLAC). As you can see, the Pi copes
admirably with 720p.
However, we did witness some issues trying to stream 1080p
video files encoded at very high bitrates and the H264 video codec.
With the Pi struggling to keep up, the display kept periodicially
blanking, and there was some jerkiness in playback. As you can see from
the output of top, the video file being played by omxplayer below is
really pushing the Raspberry Pi to its limits.
There are some files that we are unable to play with
omxplayer. In particular, MPEG-2 files are not supported. To keep the
cost of the Pi down, the Raspberry Pi Foundation did not purchase an
MPEG-2 decoding license, so there is no hardware acceleration in the
GPU for this format. Unfortunately, the Broadcom CPU does not have
sufficient grunt for software decoding of MPEG-2 multimedia.
omxplayer is also competent at playing audio files but the
lack of a console or graphical interface with no support for m3u or
pls (MP3 ShoutCast) playlists does not make it a particularly
pleasurable experience. Streaming mp3s functioned reasonably well.
Summary
If you are looking for a good audio player, we would suggest
that you use an alternative to omxplayer. But for playing videos,
omxplayer offers an excellent experience with its GPU acceleration. We
would love
to see other video players (particularly vlc, mplayer) ported over to
the Raspberry Pi using the capabilities of the GPU. Nevertheless, even
with an unofficial image of Raspbian, the Raspberry Pi
when teamed up with omxplayer performs admirably as a media centre for
such a low cost device.
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Read ahead
1. Introduction
2.
Installing omxplayer & more
3. In
Operation & Summary
Last Updated Sunday, June 17 2012 @ 01:26 PM EDT
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