More > JRiver Media Center 24 for Linux
Quick Start Guide for Installing JRiver Mediacenter 24 ARM on a Raspberry Pi
mwillems:
--- Quote from: Awesome Donkey on September 21, 2018, 06:15:02 am ---Not sure where to post this, so I'll just ask here...
Have you guys ever looked into running MC on a ODROID XU4? They're double the price of a Raspberry Pi, but they're at least 4X more powerful than a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+. I've heard people use them as Kodi (and RetroPie) boxes and they're capable of 1080p video playback with no issues. I've even heard people have ran 4K videos on them (depending on the codec, heard VP9 works) too. At the very least, you may be able to get 1080p video working on on a ARM single board computer (which isn't doable on the Pi right now).
I'm thinking about getting one and using it as a RetroPie box, but wondered if you guys ever experimented with one.
--- End quote ---
So I haven't fiddled with an Odroid XU4, but I did have an Odroid C1, C2 and U3. I can 100% not recommend Odroid's for use with MC. To start with, the most important thing to realize is that their gear uses (or used anyway) an out of tree bootloader and an older, heavily patched kernel that include proprietary mods. None of my devices booted with a mainline kernel, even with the funny bootloader. This means you basically have to use their kernels/OS images if you want everything working (the graphics drivers and hardware acceleration in particular required use of their kernels). This means you're locked into the support they provide, and if they stop offering support for a given model, you've got what you've got and that's it. For example, they end-of-lifed the U3 without fixing lots of issues that were extant, so unless and until it somehow get's mainlined in upstream, I've got a mostly useless board. Later some of the boards got rudimentary mainline kernel support, but many systems did not work with the mainline kernel (always graphics, sometimes the network stack!).
Some of the problems I've had with the ODroid boards:
- They use OpenGL-ES instead of plain vanilla OpenGL, and had wonky proprietary graphics. This means that most programs that want hardware accelerated video using OpenGL will not work without some changes and recompilation to support the devices. When I was trying to use the devices, ODROID was modifying and providing custom Kodi builds to users that had working hardware accel. MC, obviously, did not have working hardware accel, and never would unless the MC team decided to build specifically for these platforms. This also meant that you were locked into using whatever desktop environment they provided if you wanted working animations, the whole deal.
- None of the boards I used had adequate color depth to display MC (like the graphics driver did not support the required color depth). That meant that MC's interface showed as a black or white square and was unusable. Setting up a virtual framebuffer via VNC worked at the time, but it's been a few years.
- They typically only supported devices for about 18-24 months, and then moved on. This means no security updates, no hardware fixes, no nothing, and because of the goofy proprietary blobs, no reasonable possibility of community support (at least not with a working graphics stack). The Xu4 platform has been around much longer, so maybe they stopped doing this.
- Lots of miscellaneous hardware bugs (no UAC2 support, random reboots, network stack crapping out) that, because they're using an older, highly modified kernel, only they can fix.
When I bought them I hoped to use them to run MC as a front-end. When that was clearly a non-starter, I tried to use them as headless satelite systems, but they were kind of unreliable. Then I tried using one as a little VPN box, and it was actually underperforming the Pi 3 I had previously used for that. So I gave one away and the other two are sitting in a box with a frowny face drawn on it.
My advice: Read their support forums -at length- to see the kinds of crap people have been complaining about, and how long they've been complaining about it. Things may have changed since I bought from them, but I will never, ever buy another SBC from them (or anyone) that doesn't at least boot with reliable networking from the mainline kernel at launch.
bob:
--- Quote from: mwillems on September 21, 2018, 10:11:10 am ---So I haven't fiddled with an Odroid XU4, but I did have an Odroid C1, C2 and U3. I can 100% not recommend Odroid's for use with MC. To start with, the most important thing to realize is that their gear uses (or used anyway) an out of tree bootloader and an older, heavily patched kernel that include proprietary mods. None of my devices booted with a mainline kernel, even with the funny bootloader. This means you basically have to use their kernels/OS images if you want everything working (the graphics drivers and hardware acceleration in particular required use of their kernels). This means you're locked into the support they provide, and if they stop offering support for a given model, you've got what you've got and that's it. For example, they end-of-lifed the U3 without fixing lots of issues that were extant, so unless and until it somehow get's mainlined in upstream, I've got a mostly useless board. Later some of the boards got rudimentary mainline kernel support, but many systems did not work with the mainline kernel (always graphics, sometimes the network stack!).
Some of the problems I've had with the ODroid boards:
- They use OpenGL-ES instead of plain vanilla OpenGL, and had wonky proprietary graphics. This means that most programs that want hardware accelerated video using OpenGL will not work without some changes and recompilation to support the devices. When I was trying to use the devices, ODROID was modifying and providing custom Kodi builds to users that had working hardware accel. MC, obviously, did not have working hardware accel, and never would unless the MC team decided to build specifically for these platforms. This also meant that you were locked into using whatever desktop environment they provided if you wanted working animations, the whole deal.
- None of the boards I used had adequate color depth to display MC (like the graphics driver did not support the required color depth). That meant that MC's interface showed as a black or white square and was unusable. Setting up a virtual framebuffer via VNC worked at the time, but it's been a few years.
- They typically only supported devices for about 18-24 months, and then moved on. This means no security updates, no hardware fixes, no nothing, and because of the goofy proprietary blobs, no reasonable possibility of community support (at least not with a working graphics stack). The Xu4 platform has been around much longer, so maybe they stopped doing this.
- Lots of miscellaneous hardware bugs (no UAC2 support, random reboots, network stack crapping out) that, because they're using an older, highly modified kernel, only they can fix.
When I bought them I hoped to use them to run MC as a front-end. When that was clearly a non-starter, I tried to use them as headless satelite systems, but they were kind of unreliable. Then I tried using one as a little VPN box, and it was actually underperforming the Pi 3 I had previously used for that. So I gave one away and the other two are sitting in a box with a frowny face drawn on it.
My advice: Read their support forums -at length- to see the kinds of crap people have been complaining about, and how long they've been complaining about it. Things may have changed since I bought from them, but I will never, ever buy another SBC from them (or anyone) that doesn't at least boot with reliable networking from the mainline kernel at launch.
--- End quote ---
I have a C2 for testing, it's around 40% faster in general that a Pi3.
I agree that it seems far less supported than a Pi3.
It does run in ARM64 mode so it has been useful for porting assuming the Raspberry Pi eventually runs 64 bit by default.
Awesome Donkey:
Thanks for the info guys. I'll forego using a XU4 for MC and just make a little RetroPie console with it instead. :D
dcpete:
Just installed this on a Raspberry Pi 3 B+. The installation instructions were good and straight-forward. Thanks! My library lives on a NAS box (Netgear) and is quite large (150,000 tracks of mostly flac and some mp3). Playback is working fine through the analog jack, although as advised, quality could be better. There are a few gotcha's that might make this a no-go for me.
First, I cannot figure out how to make my network share stick using fstab. Have spent many hours of googling trying to do this and no-go. It is frustrating. So that means I have to manually mount the share everytime at boot before launching MC.
Second, Theater Mode is pretty much unusable. I guess the Raspberry is just not up to it. The performance is so slow, I can't even navigate anything.
Third, Gizmo doesn't work for me the way I want. It does work when playing to my android device, which is not my main use case. It doesn't work when using the Raspberry as the playback device. I mean, I can navigate the collection, but when I try to play something, it just goes out to lunch.
The first problem I guess I will solve at some point. The last two seem like show-stoppers. Any comments or advise would be appreciated.
Thanks, Chris
Awesome Donkey:
--- Quote from: dcpete on January 25, 2019, 11:44:30 am ---Second, Theater Mode is pretty much unusable. I guess the Raspberry is just not up to it. The performance is so slow, I can't even navigate anything.
--- End quote ---
Bingo. And I doubt Theater View will even be viable on a Raspberry Pi anytime soon (e.g. probably not for years) due to how bad the performance of the Pi is.
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