"Pancho"  wrote in message
news:s2tdc0$abp$1@dont-email.me...
> On 17/03/2021 16:17, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>> I did this already for audio, and now am looking to do it for video as
>> well.
>>
>> What I  want it to do is
>> - connect to the network with wifi
>> - have a web server whose interface with a laptop or a smartphone becomes
>> the 'remote'
>> - can play H264 /AAC encoded video at full frame rate up to HD
>> - can play webm/vorbis encoded live TV at full frame rate and possibly
>> HD.
>>
>> I am really looking for feedback on how powerful the thing needs to be to
>> do this - a pi zero W was well OK for just audio.
>>
> I gave up on a rpi4. It should work but good HD video depends on hardware
> acceleration and Raspbian distro software compatibility with acceleration
> was poor when I tried (i.e. Chrome and VLC didn't support it fully)

As a SMB file server (with the decoding and display on *another* PC) the Pi3
or Pi4 is fast enough. Likewise for recording to spinning HDD (not SD
because of the small size and heavy write activity) - I use TVHeadend to
record from one DVB-S2, one DVB-T2 and one DVB-T tuner: I've had all three
recording at once (on one occasion, one tuner was being used for two HD
programmes).

Using the Pi to decode and play HD videos is a bit more of a problem. The
Pi3 definitely wasn't up to the job - lots of stuttering even on SD. The Pi4
seems to be able to do SD and HD, but it uses a lot of CPU power and raises
the temperature from the normal 60 deg C to about 75 deg C, and I'm not sure
what the maximum sustained temperature of an ARM CPU is.

Likewise, using a Pi4 as a Plex server is a bit of a non-starter. It's fine
for SD, but HD seems to require transcoding which puts the CPU and temp into
the danger zone. I wish there was player hardware that could drive a TV over
HDMI and which could read a file from an SMB server. But Plex seems to
require the server to transcode stuff, rather than handling native TS files
as MPEG-2, H264 or H265. I'd use the Pi4 running VLC if this didn't push the
temp a bit high.


All this is with Raspbian Stretch on the Pi3, and RaspiOS Buster on the Pi4.
Other distros of Linux may be better.

So the gist of what I'm saying is "the Pi is fine for recording to TS files
and then serving them by SMB to another playing device (Windows), but using
the Pi as the actual video player is a bit dicey".

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05