Kodi - Pi B or Pi 2?

I'm about to start an attempt to set up a media player for initially streaming iPlayer but possibly later streaming local video.

I have a B or a 2 available - do I need the extra grunt of the more recent model or will the older one do fine?

I may extend it to downloading content to an external HDD to turn it into a sort of PVR - will this make a difference to the choice?

Cheers

Dave R

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Windows 8.1 on PCSpecialist box
Reply to
David
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I use a Pi B with OSMC for Kodi. OSMC allows you to add stuff from the repositories which OpenELEC doesn't. Best thing to do (IMHO) is try OSMC on B on a microSD card with adaptor. You can easily change to 2 if you find there's not enough grunt.

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Chris Elvidge, England
Reply to
Chris Elvidge

My bad - the original B is running a VPN and doing sterling service.

My choice is between a B+ and a 2B.

Will take your advice and try OSMC first.

Cheers

Dave R

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Windows 8.1 on PCSpecialist box
Reply to
David

Apologies if you already know this but OSMC requires two separate images (unlike Raspbian): one for B+ and one for Pi 2. You can't set it up on the B+ and then transfer the SD card to the Pi 2 for comparison.

Caught me out anyway.

Another Dave

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Change nospam to gmx
Reply to
Another Dave

Yes - just built an OSMC microSD card and it did give me two options.

Not unreasonable as the 2B is a quad core processor.

I'm just re-learning how slow a B+ is compared to a 2B as I'm running them side by side.

Tells me that I should try and use the slower one as the dedicated platform.

Cheers

Dave R

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Windows 8.1 on PCSpecialist box
Reply to
David

Could always just buy some more 2Bs.

Reply to
Rob Morley

or 3Bs

Reply to
Bob Martin

I'm running OpenELEC on an old Pi 1, and it works fine. It does have the two hardware codecs enabled though.

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Andrew Gabriel 
[email address is not usable -- followup in the newsgroup]
Reply to
Andrew Gabriel

The B is fine with OpenElec, the interface is a bit smoother with a 2B, particularly when looking at large directories from the NAS, but OpenElec is so lean the extra CPU is mostly wasted. The hard work is done by the GPU, so as long as you give it 50% of the B's 512MB, it will play video and display pictures just as fast.

I've run OpenElec on every model of B; the original 256MB one struggled due to lack of memory - it took up to 10 minutes to start playing a HD video from the HUMAX HDR, but with all the others it is almost instant. All models will play MP3 music and show picture slides just as well.

The 256MB B is now dedicated to running RISC OS, the 512MB B's is still running OpenElec as the kitchen media server. I'm moving bedroom media server on the 2B over to running Kodi over Ubuntu Mate, to make better use of its extra power. I'm going to set it up to act as a fail over for services running on my 3B, which is my ssh gateway machine, OwnCloud and Perforce server (also mail when I've set it up correctly).

---druck

Reply to
druck

:-)

I will test the B+ against the 2B and see how it goes.

You are absolutely correct that if a slower Pi can't hack it then an upgrade isn't exactly a major financial transaction.

My initial target is to replace the obsolete "smart" functions on the Bush satellite decoder - I am resisting the temptation to buy a more recent satellite PVR - and then experiment with a media client on the local network.

I suppose a Pi 3 makes sense if it is the same price as a Pi 2 just because you save the cost of a wireless dongle.

Cheers

Dave R

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Windows 8.1 on PCSpecialist box
Reply to
David

Stuff! I didn't know that. Only B and B+ here.

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Chris Elvidge, England
Reply to
Chris Elvidge

Yup. The Raspbian boot loader detects which processor it's running on and loads the appropriate kernel. If you look on the FAT32 partition of a Raspbian SD there are two kernel images: one for the single processor ARM v6 of the Pi 1 and another for the quad-core ARM v7 processor.

As far as I know only Raspian does this but OSMC and the others don't. I don't know why not because it should be simple to do and it's a very useful feature.

Another Dave

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Change nospam to gmx
Reply to
Another Dave

I'm looking forward to when there is third 64bit kernel for the ARMv8 in the Pi3.

---druck

Reply to
druck

Good point. I bet when they do it they'll find all the internal 'glue' logic uses just 0.141% of the die.

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W J G
Reply to
Folderol

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