SageTV Rasberry Pi Client

[dinki]

Please excuse the ignorant question, but for those who have successfully built SageTV server on Linux: Do you think it would be possible at this stage to build the SageTV client only on the Rasberry Pi? I have a tv in my daughter's room that I'd like to add a low budget extender to.

I've built a few projects from source before but I'm by no means an expert. Does the ARM architecture pose problems? I'd probably use a Debian distro to try if it is feasible.

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by dinki

Please excuse the ignorant question, but for those who have successfully built SageTV server on Linux: Do you think it would be possible at this stage to build the SageTV client only on the Rasberry Pi? I have a tv in my daughter's room that I'd like to add a low budget extender to.

I've built a few projects from source before but I'm by no means an expert. Does the ARM architecture pose problems? I'd probably use a Debian distro to try if it is feasible.

I think we are still a ways away from building extenders on arm.... but I think it is possible, eventually.

[Fuzzy]

There are still many who haven't even got sufficiently set up to code and compile, before taking on a whole new piece of hardware.. :-)

[dinki]

Aww come on! Where's your sense of adventure?!

Understood. My naive line of thinking was that it's only a small portion compared to compiling the server but that probably matters little (much like my line thinking!).

[stanger89]

Also remember that the Pi uses it's own hardware video decoder for playback, it doesn't have the CPU power to decode video in software. So whoever works on a Pi client will need to update the native code to use the Pi's video decoder API. I suppose if we're really lucky, there may be an mplayer build for the Pi already that we could start with, but I suspect even that will require work to get going.

[Fuzzy]

It looks like the interfaces between the miniclient and the playback might not be too overly complicated, so could likely be mapped over to any sort of playback libraries the pi might offer - but I know about nothing about the Pi.

[stanger89]

I'd have hoped so, but that's still far from just a recompile.

[wayner]

Originally Posted by stanger89

Also remember that the Pi uses it's own hardware video decoder for playback, it doesn't have the CPU power to decode video in software. So whoever works on a Pi client will need to update the native code to use the Pi's video decoder API. I suppose if we're really lucky, there may be an mplayer build for the Pi already that we could start with, but I suspect even that will require work to get going.

There is a version of Plex that works on the Pi called Rasplex. It might help to figure out how the deal with video.

[_Demo_]

I was able to get the UI to display on a Raspberry Pi but I don't have any input or media code yet.

If someone is interested in looking into the hardware decoder this would be the next step, from what I understand it will need to handle demuxing in software then pass the frames through OpenMax for decoding and presentation.

[cncb]

OpenElec (Kodi) builds for RPi are really good including "advanced" deinterlacing, full 3D (MVC) decoding/playback, and DTS-HD decoding to PCM. This would probably be a good place to look for help: http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=231092

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by _Demo_

I was able to get the UI to display on a Raspberry Pi but I don't have any input or media code yet.

If someone is interested in looking into the hardware decoder this would be the next step, from what I understand it will need to handle demuxing in software then pass the frames through OpenMax for decoding and presentation.

Maybe you can write up a guide on how to get the point you are at. I don't have a rPI, but I thinking about getting one.

[dinki]

Originally Posted by stuckless

Maybe you can write up a guide on how to get the point you are at. I don't have a rPI, but I thinking about getting one.

Cool progress for sure. An alternative to creating the guide is to create an SD image that can be flashed and then just boot from that image. Hardware is the same so distributed images make things really easy. Of course a guide on setting it up would also be nice

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by dinki

Cool progress for sure. An alternative to creating the guide is to create an SD image that can be flashed and then just boot from that image. Hardware is the same so distributed images make things really easy. Of course a guide on setting it up would also be nice

An image would good... but unless you want to be the only one developing for PI, then I'd create a guide

I was looking into the PI cross compiling tools, and I considered creating a Vagrant image to support PI, but since I don't actually have a PI, I figured I'd wait

I do have Vagrant images for x86 and x86_64 Linux, though.

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by _Demo_

I was able to get the UI to display on a Raspberry Pi but I don't have any input or media code yet.

If someone is interested in looking into the hardware decoder this would be the next step, from what I understand it will need to handle demuxing in software then pass the frames through OpenMax for decoding and presentation.

I'm guessing there are some wrapper API's out there for the OpenMax decoding. The question would be having them write to the proper surface that the UI can be rendered onto. Are you using JOGL for the rendering of the UI?

[Narflex]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

I'm guessing there are some wrapper API's out there for the OpenMax decoding. The question would be having them write to the proper surface that the UI can be rendered onto. Are you using JOGL for the rendering of the UI?

He was using OpenGL (likely OpenGLES); we already have OpenGL ports for the native miniclient (what runs on all of the SageTV extender hardware). (there's a newer one than what was included in the open source release, but that'll get updated once he's got some more free time to do that)

[Korny]

I'm not a developer, but if anyone needs/wants to borrow a Pi 2 for developement I'd be willing to ship them one of mine. I use 2 for Kodi and for bedroom/kitchen use the video quality is fine and it plays anything I throw at it. One thing to consider is that you need to pass the license code for mpeg2 to get hardward decoding.