Why Do I Need To Do This? The Raspberry Pi was designed to be an educational computer.
As part of that educational mission, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has gone out of their way to minimize the manufacturing and licensing costs in order to keep the final cost of the device down. Part of their cost cutting measures included not purchasing a pricey blanket license to use the MPEG-2 and VC-1 video codecs. This doesn’t mean the Raspberry Pi is not capable of decoding media encoded in MPEG-2 or VC-1, but that by default the codecs cannot run on the Raspberry Pi hardware for want of a proper license.
Fortunately the Raspberry Pi Foundation was able to make arrangements to sell individual licenses for each codec very inexpensively. If you’re wondering whether or not you’re the target audience for this license sale program and this tutorial, check to see if any of the following statements apply to you: I’m using my Raspberry Pi as a media center and/or general purpose device and I wish to:.
Watch DVDs (either straight from an attached DVD drive or from ripped.ISO files). In this case you need an MPEG-2 license to decode the video on the DVDs.
Watch my collection of AVI files. While AVI is technically a container format, not a codec, the vast majority of AVI files are encoded using MPEG-2 and as such you’ll need an MPEG-2 license. Watch content I’ve ripped or recorded using Windows Media Center (such as movies or television shows in the WMV container format). For this you’ll need the VC-1 license. If you’re unsure if you have the files types in question there are two simple ways to check. First, you can try to load the file in your Raspberry Pi media center. If the file is, for example, an MPEG-2 encoded video file there is a very high chance that the audio track will play just fine but the video track will fail to render, leaving the screen black.
The more precise way to check is to examine the file itself using a tool like —you can follow along with. MediaInfo will tell you the specific video codec for any video file you examine. What Do I Need?
For this tutorial we’re assuming you’ve already got your hands on a Raspberry Pi unit and installed your operating system of choice on it. Further, we’ll be using a copy of Raspbmc for this tutorial under the assumption that many of our readers and would now like to add in DVD/WMV support to their build. Even if you are using another Raspberry Pi distribution, the command line instructions and the manual configuration are still applicable to you and your Pi unit.
We’ll be covering two methods: adding the license code manually and via Raspbmc—a popular Raspberry Pi-enabled distribution of XBMC. To follow along you’ll need the following things:. An MPEG-2 ($4)and/or VC-1 license($2) purchased from the Raspberry Pi store. Access to the command prompt on the Raspberry Pi (either at the physical device or via SSH). First, we will walk you through getting the serial number off the board and purchasing the licenses you need. After that, we’ll show you how to manually add the licenses to your Pi or use the built-in tool within Raspbmc.
Purchasing the Licenses In order to purchase the licenses you need, you will have to retrieve the unique serial number for your Raspberry Pi board. This number is not printed anywhere on the circuit board but is instead stored in the hardware; it must be retrieved using the command prompt. Retrieving the Serial Number: First, visit the command prompt either at the actual terminal or remotely connected to the terminal via an SSH tool such as. If you have a keyboard attached to your Raspbmc machine, simply select “Exit” out of the Raspbmc interface via the power button in the lower left hand side of the GUI. Press ESC to load the command prompt instead of booting back into the Raspbmc GUI. This will deposit you at the command prompt. Alternatively, if you would like to access the command prompt remotely, fire up your SSH client (such as PuTTY) and enter the IP address of your Rasperry Pi unit.
Whether you have pulled up the command prompt directly at the machine or via SSH you will be prompted to login. The default login/password combination for Raspbmc is pi / raspberry.
Once at the command prompt enter the following command: cat /proc/cpuinfo Your Pi will spit back 11 lines of text, but the only one of interest to us is the last line labeled Serial. Copy the unique 16 digital serial number (partially obfuscated in the screenshot here). Because the license is granted to each specific Raspberry Pi board, repeat the above process for all Raspberry Pi boards you wish to purchase a license for. Once you have the the serial number for each individual unit, it’s time to purchase the licenses from the Raspberry Pi foundation. Purchasing the License: Visit the Raspberry Pi foundation’s purchase page for the and/or.
Enter your Raspberry Pi serial number in the appropriate blank beneath the price. Add the license to your cart. Repeat this process for all the licenses on all the units you wish to add the codecs to. Although the foundation indicates that it could take up to 72 hours for your license to arrive via email, we received ours in about 24 hours. When your email arrives it will include a code for each license formatted like such: decodeMPG2= decodeWVC1= The portion of the license is your unique 10-digit alphanumeric license code. Installing the Licenses Now that we have the license codes, it’s time to add them to your Raspberry Pi and get to enjoying enhanced media playback. Manually installing the licenses: The manual installation technique works for any installation on the Raspberry Pi, including Raspbmc.
To manually install the codecs, you need to power down your Raspberry Pi device, remove the SD card, and mount the SD card on a computer with access to a simple text editor. Raspberry Pi SD cards include a FAT formatted mini partition that holds startup tools including an easily edited configuration file labeled config.txt. Note: Some operating systems builds may not automatically create a config.txt file; if there is no config.txt simply create your own. Locate the file and make a copy, renaming it config.old—this version will serve as a backup in case anything goes wrong during the editing process. Open up the original config.txt in your text editor of choice (we’re using Notepad).
Nov 28, 2014 In this quick video, Toontrack's Mike Sanfilipp uses an Accept track featuring the Metal Machinery SDX sounds and goes through some of the mastering. Ezmix 2 mastering. After the massive success of the Mastering EZmix Pack, here comes a second collection of settings completely devoted to the art of mastering. Just like the first.
Depending on what operating system you’re running on your Pi, the configuration file may look slightly different. Leave the existing entries alone. Cut and paste the formatted license entries you received in your email, like so: Save the config.txt file and safely eject the SD card from your computer. Return the SD card to the Raspberry Pi and power up the device. Adding the licenses via the built-in Raspbmc tool: If you’re running Raspbmc, you can skip the whole manually editing the config.txt step and take advantage of the built-in tool right inside Raspbmc. To do so, head over to your Raspbmc device and navigate from the main interface to Programs – Raspbmc Settings. Once you are inside Raspbmc Settings, navigate to the System Configuration Tab and scroll down to the the Advanced System Settings section: There you can click on MPEG2 and VC1 and input your license number.
Don’t type in the entire string provided for you by Raspberry Pi, leave off the leading decodeMPG2= and decodeWVC1= portion. Only input the 10-digit string after the equal sign into each codec’s respective slot. Once you have added the appropriate codec licenses, head back to the main interface and reboot your device via the power selection menu in the lower left hand corner.
Testing the codecs: The most enjoyable way to test your new codecs is to fire up a media file you know wouldn’t play without it, sit back, and watch it play perfectly. The more technical way to check, should you run into any hiccups and wish to confirm that your license is recognized by the device, is to head to the command prompt and enter the following commands: vcgencmd codecenabled MPG2 vcgencmd codecenabled WVC1 The Pi should immediately return that the codec is enabled. Here’s the output for the MPG2 check on our test machine, for reference: Everything looks good at the command prompt and the previously audio-only files now play both their audio and video channels.
For a few bucks and a few minutes of our time, we’re ready to enjoy the wide variety of videos encoded in MPEG-2 and VC-1 codecs. Have a pressing Raspberry Pi-related topic you’d love to see us address?
Sound off in the comments or write in to with your suggestions.
This key will enable a single Raspberry Pi to decode MPEG-2 video in hardware. You will need to provide your device's internal 16-digit serial number as part of your order. Your serial number is not the number printed on your board.
To find your serial number, type cat /proc/cpuinfo at the command line as shown below: pi@raspberrypi:$ cat /proc/cpuinfo Processor: ARMv6-compatible processor rev 7 (v6l) BogoMIPS: 697.95 Features: swp half thumb fastmult vfp edsp java tls CPU implementer: 0x41 CPU architecture: 7 CPU variant: 0x0 CPU part: 0xb76 CPU revision: 7 Hardware: BCM2708 Revision: 1000002 Serial: 00000d Your license key will be delivered to you by email within 72 hours of ordering.
Back of the envelope calculations: The iPhone 4 battery is 5.25 Whr at 3.7V. The Raspberry Pi draws 300mA peak. Let's be pessimistic and assume that's the constant draw for XBMC video decoding. At 5V, that's 1.5W, which will give about 3.5 hrs of battery life.
I'd bet you'd actually see closer to 4 hours in real-life tests. SD or 720p video would probably see even lower power consumption. So, how does the iPhone do? Real-world examinations of Apple's claim of 'up to 10 hours' for playing video are hard to find. Apple's tests were done with a video from iTunes: 640×480 resolution, so this is hardly a fair comparison. pcworld.com found the life to be about 6 hours for 720p video, but that includes the power from the display (at full brightness) and wifi. (The iPhone has had battery life issues because of an OS problem, just to complicate things a bit).
So, the Raspberry Pi compares pretty well. I would love to see someone make a fair test here: play an HD video over HDMI for both devices and measure the power consumption. The Raspberry Pi will draw more current, probably, but not nearly as much as you might think. Forget teaching kids how to program; the $25 Raspberry Pi computer might just be the home entertainment STB and compact gaming console we’ve been waiting for. The low-cost computer – and its $35 sibling – should deliver double the graphical performance of the iPhone 4S, according to executive director (and Broadcom SoC architect) Eben Upton, telling Digital Foundry that not only does the BCM2835 GPU at the heart of the Raspberry Pi roast Apple’s latest smartphone, but it thoroughly whups NVIDIA’s Tegra 2. Let's put this another way: There's a new kit car announced.
It has a 100cc engine and a small frame attached to four wheels. This 'car' gets 100mpg and costs $500. It has no seats, no steering wheel, no roof, no doors, no airbags, no windshield, etc. Is it fair to compare this 'car' in terms of fuel economy and price to a brand new Corolla or F150?
If someone starts going on about 'It's a fraction of the cost and gets 4x the economy! That's the real story here!' Wouldn't you think they were a little nuts? No I'd think they're freaking geniuses. You screwed up the standard /.
Cross out the bit about the 4 wheels and no seat, and you've basically described a moped or motorcycle. Pretty exciting news, if that whole giant and exciting market had never existed until right now. This is like living in day 1 of the Harley Davidson corporation, or day 1 of Vespa. Thaaaats why they're geniuses, not because they invented yet another car model, but they're inventing entire new vehicular industry categori. Let's put this another way: There's a new kit car announced.
It has a 100cc engine and a small frame attached to four wheels. This 'car' gets 100mpg and costs $500. It has no seats, no steering wheel, no roof, no doors, no airbags, no windshield, etc.
Is it fair to compare this 'car' in terms of fuel economy and price to a brand new Corolla or F150? If someone starts going on about 'It's a fraction of the cost and gets 4x the economy! That's the real story here!' Wouldn't you think they were a little nuts? No I'd think they're freaking geniuses.
You screwed up the standard /. Cross out the bit about the 4 wheels and no seat, and you've basically described a moped or motorcycle.
Pretty exciting news, if that whole giant and exciting market had never existed until right now. This is like living in day 1 of the Harley Davidson corporation, or day 1 of Vespa. Thaaaats why they're geniuses, not because they invented yet another car model, but they're inventing entire new vehicular industry categories. Right, so what I described is NOT a Harley or a Vespa, correct? You would have to add more thing to it, correct? It would also have to meet certain safety requirement which further drive up it's cost and drive down it's fuel economy.
And you can see that I didn't compare it to a Harley or Vespa. I compared it to the standard 4 door family car and the standard truck. Are you saying that a Vespa really replace the standard car for a family of 4?
Are there businesses currently using iPhone 4Ss as embedded vid. I've got winter tires on my Matrix, haven't got stuck yet in the Canadian Prairies. It'll handle 8-foot lumber with the hatch closed, if I need sheet goods I get the store to rip them or else hook up a trailer. With the back seats down I've hauled (on separate occasions obviously) a dishwasher, a barbecue, 500lbs of bricks, three mountain bikes, a table and four chairs (not flatpacked), a hutch, and various other stuff. For anything I can't put on the trailer behind it, I rent a cargo van.
While the specs for decoding video are AWESOME (especially for the price point), what I continually point out to people is that the low CPU can still kill you on some things. I have an NVIDIA ION / Atom D330 HTPC that can destroy the 40Mbps x264 killasample absolutely no problem, yet has trouble on some of the even medium-flashy skins for XBMC.
Like i said, performance/dollar this thing is still awesome, but you do still have to think of the whole package. It's mouthwatering. Waiting is the hard part.
I want one in my car, at my desk, at work, everywhere. Do you think they'll sell these as a six pack?:). I know that the Raspberry Pi is specifically advertised as supporting hardware decoding of H.264 up to 1080p30 at up to 40 Mbps.
What I want to know is if it also supports VC-1 and MPEG-2 decoding at the same resolutions and data rates. I know that the underlying SoC has this capability, but will it be blocked or omitted from the SDK for licensing/patent reasons? Any of these three codecs can be found on Blu-Rays, and transcoding the rips to H.264 would reduce the quality. Also, what about bitstreaming the HD audio codecs (Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD MA) over HDMI 1.3? I know Raspberry Pi didn't want to pay for audio decoding licenses, but simply sending the raw bitstream to a receiver over the HDMI link shouldn't present any licensing issues (and is the best quality method to use anyway).
For the Raspberry Pi to be a good media streamer, it needs to be able to do these things. My understanding is that the GPU supports hardware decoding of xvid/mpeg2/h264 etc. The issue is licensing the patents from MPEG-LA. The cost of licensing a codec is too high to license them all for every Pi sold: the cost of licensing AAC alone is 4% of the total price of the board.
So, either there will be a hardware version that comes with all the codecs (and costs a lot more), or there will a software codec pack that you can pay to download. Either way, the codecs are going to be leaked eventually, so I.
The issue is licensing the patents from MPEG-LA. The cost of licensing a codec is too high to license them all for every Pi sold: the cost of licensing AAC alone is 4% of the total price of the board. So, either there will be a hardware version that comes with all the codecs (and costs a lot more), or there will a software codec pack that you can pay to download. The problem is that the Raspberry Pi's relatively weak ARM-based CPU is almost certainly not powerful enough to decode high-bitrate 1080p VC-1. Yeah.what size?
And it needs a special adapter to hook to an HDMI monitor. Sorry.you're grasping at straws. Don't get me wrong, the BeagleBone's a GREAT device. So's the BeagleBoard and PandaBoard. All of them are way more expensive.and they're overkill for what's being done here and for that purpose. They might work out for YOU, but they don't provide the stated purposes (Providing an inexpensive computer specifically intended to do comp-sci education with what's a very usable but almost utterl. BeagleBone's how much more?
Besides.the OLPC's problem was they aimed high. This beastie's down to roughly the pricepoint in question. Not for profit, remember. And.the devices are very much a first cousin to a device that retails for $99 or less for the mid-range and basic models- that plays back things like Hulu, Netflix, etc.
BoM costs place the Roku2 series devices right down into the price-point of the R-Pi.and the only real differences are possibly a bit of POP RAM profile and a few diffe. I love the Raspberry Pi project, and have my CC ready to order. However, this isn't that spectacular of a use for it:) There are a ton of specialized boxes that already do it in a neat package with a proper remote. (personally I use a WD TV Live both 1st and 2nd gen). To all those criticizing the performance, or codec support etc etc, remember this is just ONE of the many things this thing can do and it's just to show you the potential of what a $25/$35 general computing device can be made to do. Well, it is impressive and very much an accomplishment, even if you consider other limitations already pointed out. But all I see is an implementation that might provide playback support.
One very important thing for me in a media center is tuner support. So until there is support for a tuner for the Raspberry Pi, I'll still need to use a PC as a media center. XBMC uses many tuners, but depends on their drivers being installed in the OS. I don't see that happening any time soon for the R Pi. I hope I'm wron. The plus side being that Raspberry Pi costs only $25. If you already have an external drive with media on it, then it's a bargain.
My suspicion is that its power consumption will also be quite low, which is a big plus these days. Looks like it'd suit me fine, I'm not an intense media consumer, so high-performance HTPC isn't especially something that I need. FWIW, I suspect a large part of doing this is just because you can. To demonstrate that you don't need the latest and greatest (read: most expensive). Because the storage devices are centralized, at least in my case with a media server in the basement.
The TVs and sound systems in each bedroom are NOT thousands of dollars. You can get 40' 1080p systems for around $300 now.
Cheaper if you can deal with 720p. Now, for under $50 (includes case, power supply, etc.) I can pop a box on the back of the TV to access everything I have centrally stored (400+ movies, 200+ TV episodes, 100+ short animations, 1,000+ music/audio) in each room. And if their Hulu and Amazon Prime plug-ins for XMBC work as well, get all that. Because unless you build an entire x86 architecture HTPC, any little desktop streamer box is going to be SOC based. Which will inevitable have a really crappy selection of codec compatibilities and will likely baulk at multiple audio tracks and suck at rendering soft-subtitles.
And Ordered Chapter support in MKV will either be nonexistant or just cause hard-lockups. Not only does the RasPi's SOC handle Level 4.1 h.264, because it's running the eminently hackable XBMC you are likely to be able to play a much. Do note that XBMC does NOT support ordered Chapters. I've asked for it but apparently ffmpeg needs to update to support it and they (ffmpeg) refuse for 'security reasons'?! I want it so I can rip BD that have multiple cuts and create just one vid but cannot currently get XBMC to allow me to select 'tracks'. Likewise XBMC won't do MKV menus so far as I know - not that I know how to make them lol.
I happen to use XBMC on Atom ION hardware. Under $300, full blown Linux installs, plays anything I throw at it (ma. Because you don't need to. Reason I'm excited about Raspberry Pi, is that it's designed as a learning tool. I want to play, tinker, blah blah. Reason I find XMBC on RP exciting, is that this is something I could 'theoretically' make.
Now I know full well I don't stand a chance, but definitely provides some inspiration. The really interesting thing, is that with the hardware price so low, it suddenly means you could make a physical product based upon their hardware, your software and sell it for a reasonable. Recording HD or even SD video can put a strain on a chip and the Raspberry was made to be low priced not high powered. But I have a feeling once you added all the stuff required to make it a fully functional HTPC you'd be better off just getting one the the AMD E-350s and calling it a day.
Recording HD or even SD video hardly puts any strain on a chip, since you would be foolish to record anything that didn't come pre-compressed, either from a digital tuner, or analog encoder. All the chip has to do is shuffle bits from the capture subsystem to the storage subsystem. The question then becomes one of whether the performance of a late-90s PC is sufficient for your metadata needs, running the database, processing guide data, performing scheduling decisions, post-recording analysis of the video, etc. If you're actually looking for a fully functional HTPC, you're better off getting real hardware, and not some intentionally underpowered system.
Electricity is cheap, modern chips idle very efficiently, and it's not like you can't just put the thing in standby or power it off if you're that concerned. Having some real meat behind your HTPC just opens up a bunch of new possibilities, and opportunity for expansion. Not to mention that this wasn't intended for the same audience as OLPC was aiming for (Not that you couldn't manage to do that. An HDMI capable monitor worth messing with this device will only set someone back $99 retail plus the cost of an HDMI to DVI cable for about $20.) It was for providing a brutally inexpensive computer for teaching Computer Science to the 'FIRST' world that could be priced as cheap or cheaper than the textbooks for the classes. Not all things are immediately intended for 'the t.
This sounds very much like some of your AVI files have video encoded with MPEG-2 or VC1 (or possibly some other unsupported codec) and you don't have the MPEG-2 or VC1 codec installed (only h.264/MPEG-4 content can be played by default). I had exactly the same issue when I first installed RaspBMC and tried to play DVD content (it plays like an audio file, in the background, as you describe). The says: Q: Can Raspbmc play back MPEG2 or VC1? Raspbmc offers hardware decoding of these codecs, provided the codec pack has been purchased from the Raspberry Pi foundation website You can find out the particular codec you need by opening the 'Media Information' window in VLC then clicking the 'Codec Details' tab (the screenshot below was taken on a Mac, but I imagine the Linux version will be similar). The video stream is usually Stream 0.
If its MPEG-2 or VC1 then you should be able to purchase a codec and play it just fine. Note that (at time of writing) the Raspberry Pi does not support playback of files encoded with the DIVX3 codec, which appear in VLC as type 'MPEG-4 Video v3 (DIV3)'. This has a reply from dom (near the bottom) which confirms this: That is not MPEG 4 compliant and not supported. DIVX3 is actually a codec reverse engineered from an old Microsoft codec, than was a non-standard variant of MPEG 4. The hardware codec can't support it. In order to get around this, you should be able to re-encode the file to one of the supported formats. The answer to includes a script that claims to convert from DIVX3 to H.264 (which then should be playable on the Pi without purchasing a codec).
K-lite Mega Codec Pack
It looks like it uses to do the legwork. I've not tried it, so use at your own risk. The How-To Geek article contains an excellent tutorial on what to do from here, but in a nutshell, once you've purchased the relevant codec, the license file will get emailed to you. You can then install the codec by following the instructions in the How-To Geek article above or section of the.
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