Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
You can have multiple keys for multiple Raspberry Pi units (allowing you to swap out
an SD card). To add additional keys, simply append them in a comma-separated list,
like this:
decode_MPG2=0x18675309,0xdeadbeef,0x11001001
Feel free to try these example “license keys” out if you must, but they're not real. Sorry.
You'll need to pay the license fee to get working keys for your Raspberry Pi.
Videocore Accelerated Video Codecs
In January, the Raspberry Pi Foundation pushed out a firmware update to
add support for several free video codecs, specifically, VP6, VP8, MJPEG,
and Ogg Theora. This support differs from the other codecs, because they
are not handled completely in hardware, but instead, are accelerated with
the videocore libraries. This means they are not as fast as they would be if
the BCM2835 system-on-chip was doing all the work in hardware, but
they're much much faster than they would be going through a pure software
video decoder. Practically, this means that you can get pretty seamless
playback for files in these formats via omxplayer (
Hack #46
) or XBMC (
Hack
#54
) without having to do anything special at all.
Build a Pi MusicBox
HACK 48
The Pi MusicBox turns your Raspberry Pi into a controllable music player
that supports Spotify, Apple Airplay, and Web Radio.
Say you have a huge library on Spotify (20+ million songs) just waiting for you to play
them on your computer. Spotify is great. But how to play these songs on your audio
setup? Using a headphones cable? That's not great with your laptop. Bluetooth? Un-
reliable.
Enter
Pi MusicBox
. It turns your Pi into a music player (supporting Spotify, Apple Air-
play, and Web Radio), which you can operate from your desktop computer or from
your couch using a tablet, smartphone, or laptop. Connect your Raspberry Pi to an
audio setup, install the software, and welcome a new way of listening to music!
It can output the sound not only through the headphones jack of the Pi, but also
through HDMI and USB, and it supports playing music via WiFi, Last.fm, and from the
SD card. The software will detect as much of the configuration as possible at boot,
and configure the system automatically. But you have to supply the system with some
information.
