Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
At the time of writing, the only project to use these hardware codecs was the OMX
project maintained by XBMC. We will compile GStreamer-OMX later in the topic,
which can be used to stream a video from the Pi to another computer or watch HD
video from the console.
Buying licenses
You can go to
http://www.raspberrypi.com/license-keys/
to buy licenses
that can be used once per device. Follow the instructions on the website to get
your license key.
MPEG-2
Known as H.222/H.262, this is the standard of video and audio encoding widely
used by digital television, cable, and satellite TV. It is also the format used to store
video and audio data on DVDs.
This means that watching DVDs from a USB DVD-ROM drive should be possible
without any CPU overhead whatsoever. This is only possible with using
OMX-player or XBMC Media centre, discussed later in the topic.
VC-1
VC-1 is formally known as SMPTE 421M and was developed by Microsoft. Today, it
is the official video format used on the Xbox and Silverlight framework. The format
is supported by HD DVD and Blu-ray players.
The only use for this codec would be to watch Silverlight packaged media, but as
you might already know, it is not a widely used format.
Hardware monitoring
The Raspberry foundation provides a tool called
vcgencmd
that gives you detailed
data about various hardware used in the Pi. This tool is updated from time to
time and can be used to log the temperature of the GPU, voltage levels, processor
frequencies, and so on.
To see a list of supported commands, type the following command in the console:
vcgencmd commands
