Serviio

Hi everyone,

Received my RPi a few days ago, fired it up with debian squeeze. Normally use microchip PIC series and PicBasicPro Looking for an application for this super cheap credit card sized SDK computer.
Taped onto back of a usb 1TB external drive case?


any thoughts ?

Cheers...



..

Well it should work, but only for things that need no transcoding, also RAM will be an issue I guess.

Anyway should just be a case of downloading the linux package, installing java (e.g. http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewt ... 91&p=92193) and then either get ffmpeg or compile it from source (3.5 hours aparently) example guide is near the bottom of here http://raspi.tv/2012/get_iplayer-full-i ... om-scratch or look on the serviio wiki

Otherwise there may be a cross compiler that you could use to speed up the process. If you do get a new build of ffmpeg compiled (I have no idea what is in the repo), then hold onto it, and do write up a post/guide about how you set it up, and what the performance was like.

3.5 hours?! I thought the Pi was supposed to be half decent. The ARM SoC in my Synology NAS compiles FFmpeg in about 25mins.

Just quoted what I read, they may have gone and compiled every library under the sun for it at the same time. I'm too busy atm otherwise I would have ordered one to play with, maybe once I finish my doctorate. A few of the people I work with have ordered them and at least one has arrived, so I'll ask them what compile time for common stuff is like.

It looks like Raspberry Pi is an ARMv6 core, compared to most current NAS ARMv5 chips, so although it's clocked slower it is in fact much more powerful hardware. This means it has SIMD instructions which should hugely improve its ability to encode media. However, that assumes that FFmpeg contains the necessary optimizations. I guess this is ever more likely though given the number of tablets and android handsets using ARM cores.

I guess perhaps the speed bottleneck relates to it using an SD card as storage.

@dencon, have you had any luck running serviio on your Raspberri Pi? I've recently learned of this amazing item and am putting some thought into getting one. Would love to hear your experiences. Thanks!

Here is a complete set of free lessons on building an OS for the RPi

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/freshers/raspbe ... orials/os/

Now, you can build a super computer out of these little boards !

http://www.southampton.ac.uk/mediacentr ... uter.shtml

I just got one today as a birthday gift!

Revision B now has 512MB RAM which is the minimum requirement to run Serviio.

Green with envy....

My NAS (QNAP TS-219PII) only has 512 MB of RAM and only 380 MB is dedicated to JAVA. I have yet to find that the RAM is my bottleneck. Instead, it's the lack of a FPU that chokes up my ARMv5 (1.6 GHz) processor when transcoding.

Thus, it seems as if Raspberry Pi should handle all this much better. 40 Mbit/s H.264 sounds pretty impressive!

I've still not managed to install Serviio on it yet, looking through Raspberry Pi forums.
There a lot support to install XBMC but no one has come up with a custom Serviio bare OS image for it. The CPU can be overclocked to 1Ghz

Imagine this connected to your WiFi router directly running Serviio 24/7 without a power hungry PC. Probably the easy way would be install a Linux variant, install Java, Apache for Marks Web UI, and then Serviio but this may use too much RAM. A custom image with bare requirements would be great - Linux experts we need your help!

You have to buy licence keys separately to unlock VC1 and MPEG2 codecs at low prices. But if Serviio transcodes the file, not sure if they are a requirement?

Wouldn't RaspBMC be of interest? You can just install Serviio on top of that and you have a combined Serviio server/XMBC player depending on whether you connect it directly to your TV or not. It even supports AirPlay.

It should be noted, that without GPU support in FFmpeg, this wouldn't work very well.

Edit: It seems as if Raspberry Pi is OpenMax based. In other words, we need to get FFmpeg hooked into OpenMax to get some form of GPU acceleration.

An OpenMax FFmpeg wrapper

Ive read OpenELEC provides a better solution.
Im thinking installing Debian OS, this way i can run Serviio and SabNZBd on it making the ultimate media server!

You're still faced with horrible FFmpeg performance.

Would be difficult without Debian to install Java otherwise Serviio simply would not work
Oracle has support on the RPi running Debian Sqeeze
Anyone had any luck?

Of course. What I meant was that the Raspberry Pi isn't that capable when you can't use the GPU. Since Serviio relies on FFmpeg, you basically have a 700 MHz CPU doing all the heavy lifting.

Serviio on RPi, you need to get the right version of Raspbian that supports soft floating point as the main release is hard floating point. Java for RPi as yet doesn't support hard floating point and performance is very poor. Oracle are active with RPi and plan to bring to the platform in 2013 but that won't hlep ffmpeg on a 700mhz cpu (or 1ghz if overclocked officially).

RPi can hardware decode and encode on the fly many formats but you need to use the OMXplayer to get the best performance. So unless Zip rewrites Serviio for RPi to use the hardware encoding then performance won't be great.

MiniDLNA works very well on RPi and good alternative for Serviio.

Serviio on RPi would be really good but a thing issues to resolve the first being Oracle supporting the platform.

Heya. How did you get on in the end? Any joy?