Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
5
Multimedia Hacks
One of the first things many people do with their Raspberry Pis is to set up an XMBC
media center. If that's where you'd like to start as well, we've got you covered (
Hack
#54
).
But there's a lot more you can do in the multimedia realm with this fun little device.
Why limit it to being the media server when you can take it on the road and use it for
in-car entertainment (
Hack #55
)? You can also turn it into a radio (
Hack #49
), play your
favorite childhood video games (
Hack #51
), jazz up your next party with a photobooth
(
Hack #53
), and more.
Play Video Files
HACK 46
Want to watch a video on your Raspberry Pi? Using the right software will
help you get the best performance on playback, even from HD 1080p
files!
The Raspberry Pi is not quite the same as a normal computer, but one thing that it
can do very well is video decoding. On your Linux laptop, when you play a video file,
you are probably decoding that file entirely in software. This works fine, because your
laptop CPU is fast enough to do this work in real-time. The Raspberry Pi CPU is not
generally fast enough to do this, though, so to make up for it, the Broadcom 2835
system-on-chip graphics processing unit (GPU) includes dedicated hardware to de-
code (and encode) video files. You can access this hardware through the VideoCore
libraries, but most of the video player software commonly used on Linux does not yet
have support for those libraries.
Enter omxplayer, a video player specifically made to access the Raspberry PI's GPU
via the VideoCore libraries. It was made by Edgar (gimli) Hucek, and while it is not
fancy (it has no GUI), it just works. The maintained source code for
omxplayer
lives at
