making a media client from a pi....

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)

If you just want media try KODI.

This was the case after rpi4 was released.but later it was fixed. Firefox+ youtube, mplayer, kplayer works fine

I was also after KODI (not for the RPI4, but for the PC, or VM), however it was not possible to compile.

As I understand it, H264 decodes fine, but not webm/vorbis... trying to get a feel for the support...

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".

Try OSMC on Pi3

That's perfectly plain and a good answer and thank you

I am not sure what formats I have tested. The issue was definitely in youtube video - could have been format related, but was solved at least somewhen beginning of last year

Yep, you are correct, I tried immediately after the Pi4 came out. However, I seem to recall a thread a month or two complaining that hardware acceleration had been turned off again in the recent distro release.

I also have a fair bit of prejudice. About 10-15 years ago I tried to run an underpowered AMD cpu based HTPC. It was supposed to work due to hardware acceleration, but it was constantly getting glitches and breaking. Hardware acceleration would fail, TV would stutter.

Since then I've used powerful chips and the headache goes away.

Something like a Pi that could do video (including x265) and remote desktop would be ideal, *if* it worked reliably.

Yebbut, for the Pi4 you get prebuilt images. I've not played with VMs recently but I would think you would want passthru video for KODI.

FWIW, I don't see the attraction, I like a proper PC desktop on my main TV, I use a mouse and keyboard not a remote. The I can watch TV or do a spot of programming from the comfy chair.

Even on a 3B+ I had no issues with librelec/kodi/widevine/netflix/iplayer/tvheadend HD playback ...

It seems to default to VP8/VP9 codec whenever I take notice

Yes. However, it is still possible to request h.264 streams. For browsers, you might need a plugin like "h.264ify". It could be that the RPi modified version of Chromium has that built in. The next link in the chain is if the browser will recognise the h.264 stream as such and offload it to the hardware decoder. Probably not if it's not the RPi amended Chromium...

The alternative is to use youtube-dl and pipe the output to omxplayer, e.g. I have this saved which used to work but haven't tried it in years, really:

youtube-dl -f 96 -o - 'https://youtube-url-goes-here' | omxplayer -b -r

--timeout 100 -I --no-keys pipe:0

I was looking to replace the the Popcorn A100, but replacement is too expensive latest model ~500 Remote is part of the entertainment. May be I'll find time to compile the KODI software.

I don't know - I configured the RPI4 to do a diskless boot PXI and put debian. I kept the original kernel and I use Firefox. As desktop I put Trinity (TDE) and everything seems just fine. The only blocker I hit in replacing the PC is the scanner software that is coming with some x86 prebuild binary :/

The video however works flawlessly.

I don't know your scan usecase, but you can run OCRmypdf on the pi.

I scan directly to a network share and then ocrmypdf watches the folder and converts to searchable PDF.

I wanted to replace the PC with RPI4 as desktop. But on the PC I have the scanner attached, that I need very often, so for now I stick to the current setup. I don't need OCRmypdf I need a scan of an invoice or a document - this means put the paper into the device and press the button. When I have time, I'll have a look at the next version of the scanner software. It might be they have driver for aarch64.

Which scanner? saned should support almost any...

EPSON Perfection V330 Photo scanner

Never bothered to try that. I tried saned in 2003/4 last time :) I have a process that works 100%. I do not put an effort to update the process if not needed. I could of course use something like USB to TCP converter and handle it on another machine that is i386, but there were few other issues, that I can not recall exactly now.

NY seemed to cover only the case where HW acceleration is not used at all. While I haven't tried to use a Pi as a media player recently, even the original Pi worked fine as video player back almost a decade ago, for SD MPEG2 and h.264 content. I remember the thing had trouble running the XBMC (later KODI) GUI, but video and audio were fine. A quick Google shows the acceleration even in the first model was good enough to handle even 1080p content although only up to 1080p30.

The issue is whether or not Webm/Vorbis encoding can utilise hardware acceleration. I might just get one and try it out

I am sure H264 can, which is my other standard