Oh my! This is such a crazy upgrade. I've been using the RPI2 as my HTPC/NAS at my folks, and I'm so happy with it. I was itching to get the last one for myself.
USB 3.0! Gigabit Ethernet! WiFi 802.11ac, BT 5.0, 4GB RAM! 4K! $55 at most?!
What the!? How the??! I know I'm not maintaining decorum at Hacker News, but I am SO mighty, MIGHTY excited!
I'm setting up a VPN to hook this (when I get it) to my VPS and then do a LOT of fun stuff back and forth, remotely, and with the other RPI at my folks.
Using the Pi as a file server can be a bit flaky. The ethernet controller was an USB one, and was neither really stable or took load very well. The new PHY on a dedicated link is probably the single biggest improvement with this new revision.
The HEVC is a bit unexpected considering the high license fees and general uncertainties. Let's hope the documentation can be released as well.
So unsure at this stage, but that may well be the case for any license fees regarding HVEC. Heck, if they have absorbed those costs into the base price - I'd be utterly amazed.
I just setup my RockPro64 with 4GB, also PCIex4, have an SSD, going to setup a raid at somepoint when I get it all figured out. The board was a bit more expensive than the pi4, but I am interested in playing around with it.
> The ethernet controller was an USB one, and was neither really stable or took load very well
Hmm... that explains a problem I had with a pi of mine. Every time the 10/100 switch it was connected to rebooted, the pi would lose its ethernet link until rebooted. Never had this with other machines on the same switch.
There is an official PoE board that fits the pi 3+ which uses a 4 pin header by the ethernet jack to grab power. The pi 4 appears to have the same header.
did they finally release the 100W spec? IEEE really let that spec languish for too long -- vendors got impatient and implemented their own. i had to write 60W PoE code supporting three different specs around 2015. bosch's design was the worst.
The big shortcoming of the other Raspberry Pis I have is power. Plug anything into it and you risk undervoltage problems (even with the official supply)
I agree with your excitement! I've been waiting for this upgrade forever. I keep looking at the other options out there, but while their hardware is great, their software is terrible.
IMO, at this point you're not paying so much for the pi, but rather for the community and accessories. It's the entire environment that makes the pi useful; not just the hardware.
(I speak as someone who sucks at programming and doesn't spend a 1/100th of the time learning the latest as I used too as a teen. So having the community around to help with my latest project that I need something more than a microcontroller for, is immensely worthwhile. Obviously those who don't need these types of spillovers would probably be better served with other hardware.)
Even so, A72 is a highly-inefficient chip (which is probably why they set such a low clock speed for it). Cortex-A73 would've been much better. But I guess there always has to be at least one obvious lacking in Raspberry Pi generations.
I'm intrigued as to why they didn't use a big.LITTLE design (or whatever they're calling it these days). Perhaps mainstream-linux still isn't so great at handling it.
The addition of gigabit ethernet and USB 3.0 means that a Pi no longer feels like a bottleneck in one’s home network. I know that the Pi was invented as an educational product, but thanks to the Linux distribution OSMC it is commonly used as a media center for playing films, music, TV, etc.
I have had gigabit internet for a few years now, and every day on average, I torrent a Blu-Ray image onto my main computer. However, subsequently moving the Blu-Ray to my Raspberry Pi 3 media center is always slow on two counts: 1) ethernet from the router to the Pi was limited to 10/100 speeds, and 2) the Pi could push large files to an attached hard drive only over a USB 2.0 port. Consequently, on a Raspberry Pi 1–3 it takes an hour just to move a high-definition file around one’s home network! On a Pi 4, it looks like one can just put the torrent client directly on the media center.
As to properly balance out this review, what exactly were the issues you had that needed to be answered by a community for the RockPro64? The RPi seems to have a slew of things that just work on it out of the box, and if there are issues, 99.9% of the time you can find the solution with a quick Google. Very curious to understand what type of issues something like the RockPro64 (which has appeared numerously in this thread as a 'great alternative') faces for anyone interested in the alternatives.
Are you running it as both NAS storage and a Plex server? How's transcode performance?
I put together a NAS/Plex box with a Kaby Lake Celeron and some hard drives, but I was thinking of splitting it out into separate NFS and Plex servers.
Keep in mind that you are in a very small world there... most people alive today will never have internet that fast, personally i've never had a connection above 6 Mbits in the middle of a city, and I know that's likely above the median globally (keep in mind average is a poor metric due to connections like yours, SDL is still the primary type of endpoint for homes)
My point being, the previous generations USB based ethernet still has massive headroom for the vast majority of peoples internet.
The ethernet port on the 3B+ is still attached to the USB hub on the board. In my tests it never gets more than 300 Mbps. The Pi 4 should have true GigE support because it doesn't have that limitation.
Just read theverge review on how the Pi struggles to play a video full screen, even if resolution is 480p. How are then people using it as a media center?
What review did you read? Playing video is likely the only thing the PI 3 does really well; even most H265 FHD do play without stuttering on the 3+ although we're close to the board limits.
Are you sure the writer didn't use the board the wrong way? Some people still believe that videos should be streamed after being transcoded because that is the only way to watch them on their ridiculously limited smart TV which lacks the necessary codecs to watch them the right way. Of course doing this over WiFi would make the problem even worse.
To optimize network usage, videos should be kept encoded until they reach the player so that the network won't be clogged. If you use the PI to read the movie as a file over a shared SMB or NFS directory, the network usage is so low that you could watch like 20 different movies on 20 different players on the same home network at the same time. Probably even more.
The PI 3 (and to some extent probably the PI4 too) is still behind many other boards in other contexts (openness, performance, price) but playing video is surely not one of them.
tl;dr they "built a gaming pc" with a "wireless anti static bracelet", RAM installed in single channel, backwards PSU, terrible parts choices... don't trust the verge.
I've never had these problems with the various media center apps. My Pi 3B+ has been running Kodi for a few months now, and it happily plays 1080p videos at what appears to be smooth 60 FPS.
Mind, this is specifically running under Kodi, which is optimized as a media center, and is NOT running also a full desktop environment. Attmepting to do the same in, say, the stripped down Chromium browser was an exercise in frustration. That's always been a major limitation of the 3D acceleration in the Pi, as the libraries took a long while to mature and were always a bit hacky.
The announcement for proper OpenGL support and compositing in the desktop environment is huge for me. It seems like it'll finally push the Pi up into "workshop computer" territory that, while underpowered, should be just capable enough to run some of my always on operations and act as a lightweight CAD station for small parts. I ordered one as soon as I woke up and saw the announcement, and we'll see how well that works in practice.
Can you link it? Was the video streaming or playing from disk? Perhaps it was an unsupported video codec? There are certain circumstances where the pi may struggle to play video, but I think for common formats they graphics driver has hardware level support for decoding. If the video format was weird and it had to decode with the CPU it could see problems. Another issue is the power supply. If you do not use a quality 2A power supply, a little red light by the power jack will indicate reduced power and it will throttle the CPU. This applies to the older PIs, but I've not seen the Pi4 yet.
I imagine the wait must be agonizing! Why not just have a NFS server on your more powerful computer for the Pi to stream the file from? 100 Mbps is easily enough to stream any Bluray.
> Why not just have a NFS server on your more powerful computer for the Pi to stream the file from?
The “more powerful computer” is a laptop, and it is only being used for torrenting the films because it has gigabit ethernet. I don’t want to have to leave it on all the time, and sometimes it is still packed in its case when I want to sit down and watch a film. Storing the films on a hard drive attached to the Pi is a lot more convenient.
Can't wait to buy this, boot it up, play with it for four hours, then stick it in the same desk drawer with the other Pis I have bought over the years.
(The upgrades look great, just my attention span is not so great)
* A Zero W hooked up to a PM2.5 to do air quality monitoring in the house. Just bought a couple more sensors for it (VOC, eCO2, etc), but haven't hooked them up yet.
* A 3B+ running the UniFi controller for my home network.
* One is running a custom Hue automation I built to shift the color temperature of the lights throughout the day.
* One is built into an internet connected dog treat dispenser I built as a gift.
* A rather dusty Pi is running CNCjs so I can have a decent interface to my cheap grbl CNC.
* And finally I have a Pi running OctoPrint for my 3D printer.
And that's just the ones currently running. I've got two more in progress. One to automate an exhaust fan based on inside and outside temperatures. Another is destined for the garage where it will replace the not-so-great MyQ "smart" functionality of the garage door opener.
To each their own I suppose, but I've been consuming RasPis like candy. $60 all-in gets you a fairly beefy platform with almost all the I/O you could require and a vast ecosystem of software and HATs. Honestly their only downside is that at some point I'll have to reconfigure my home network when I start exhausting my current internal /24 with 200 RasPis.
> A Zero W hooked up to a PM2.5 to do air quality monitoring in the house. Just bought a couple more sensors for it (VOC, eCO2, etc), but haven't hooked them up yet.
Do you have any resources on how to set up something like that?
> * A Zero W hooked up to a PM2.5 to do air quality monitoring in the house. Just bought a couple more sensors for it (VOC, eCO2, etc), but haven't hooked them up yet.
We have neighbors that smoke, and sometimes based upon wind patterns it blows into our yard. Any idea if they have sensors that can pick up this sort of thing so I can close our windows?
That is awesome, it took me awhile to start using mine. I just put together a pi hole, plex server on Rockpro64 and I just bought a tinker board from Frys for $50. Runs a bit hot though
What software are you running? I have been using Dietpi for almost all my projects. Plex comes native( as an option to install) and a bunch of other software.
I actually came here to ask which would be a better platform for building a CNC, Raspberry Pi or Arduino. Is your cheap grbl CNC using an arduino to control the steppers?
Don't forget to keep it powered while it's in the drawer so you could ssh and build something really awesome.
Maybe it's a personality flaw, but I get plenty of satisfaction from just reading blog write-ups if things I could have done with my tech junk, without all the associated time invested.
It's much easier to vicariously enjoy projects like these, which is why I think drawer-dwelling is an inevitable destiny for most of these widgets.
My flaw regarding SBCs, is that I want to master the whole stack (what variant of linux.. , how is <multimedia server> is written,...), yet I don't have the context to, so I get fed up with almost good use cases and lose interest.
That's also why I'm tring microcontrollers, it's back to low level, less shiny projects, but mentally saner.
Well, same reason why so many people watch playthroughs of difficult games on YT without playing the games themselves. There is a pay off for seeing what you could do if you had the time or motivation to do so.
I also like getting grand plans for a (hardware) project, ordering the parts from Ali express, then losing interest before the parts have arrived, so they still end up in 'the drawer'.
I can relate. However these days I have found a new life for those abandoned Pis: I install Pi-Hole [1] on them and set them up for family and close friends.
I run a pi-hole as well and I have to say it's been an absolutely great addition to my home network.
It essentially blocks tracking and advertisements on all devices, not just my computers with ad block.
Just need to keep the block lists up to date every couple weeks, but it's honestly great.
I wish pi-hole was just a tiny bit more polished. I found it takes a lot of work (and knowledge of linux networking) to get up and running properly and stable.
I use one of my Pis as a PulseAudio network sink that lets me stream music to it from every computer in the house. Not the most creative use but maybe some inspiration.
I have to confess that I have never even booted up my Pi-3. Now I wonder if it is worth booting up the Pi-3 or should I wait till I get my hands on the Pi-4. That way I don't have to think of upgrading.
The Pi 3 is no less usable than it was before the announcement. Why bother getting a Pi 4 when you haven't found a use for your 3 yet? I still use a Pi 2 with no complaints.
One downside to the 4 is that it is moving from the low power to laptop realm in terms of power consumption which was my main interest in them. If top performance is what you care about, the Raspberry Pi is the wrong place to go looking for it.
Heh, I know the feeling. I have three retired Pi systems (two OG units and a 1B+), but I have three running 24/7 as well: first is a 2B+ running OSMC as my media center. The second one is a 3B with a sense hat, running rtl433 and MRTG to graph outdoor and basement temperature and humidity received from transmitters on-premises, barometric pressure from the hat (and also displaying data on the LED display). The last is a 3B+ running Home Assistant.
I've been - cross my fingers - lucky with MicroSD cards (usually Samsung, sometimes SanDisk), but having USB3 on the new model is quite the game-changer.
ETA: I do have rsync backing up my Pi setups, so losing a MicroSD would be merely annoying rather than catastrophic.
I sold a company and the hardware wasn't included. I have a bunch sitting idle, plus about 1500 RFID tags and 20 readers. Takes up space but I can't get rid of. Should sell them.
I have a few in drawers, but I do have three running at most times in my house. One is literally just a print server. One is for hobbies. One is for watching movies.
- Half the RAM but double the cores. I'm waiting for some benchmarks to see if the RPi4 is faster and by how much.
- Also Gigabit Ethernet and it works great. My downloads are always at 108-111MB/s for the whole transfer.
- Not USB 3.0 but has "oldschool" SATA through an internal USB-2-SATA adapter. It's at least more compact, otherwise the RPi4 with an external USB 3.0 drive will probably work even better.
- works with a normal 12V power supply, which could be lying around already, from older external drives.
Not to disrespect the RPi4, as I'll be getting one of them too very soon.
The distinction in actual usage between using cloud, server, and homelab to describe their setup seems to be rooted in their purpose.
* Home Lab :: Running a partial/full enterprise IT stack for fun and education.
* Home Server :: Running primarily internal services like file storage, backups, media streaming, home automation, maybe some light networking.
* Home Cloud :: Running primarily external services on the public internet to replace 3rd party SaaS services. More often than not this is done with a VPS provider rather than physical hardware in your home.
So maybe you find the terminology annoying since everything is cloud these days but it's genuinely useful to us folks in the forums. You can also call "home cloud" selfhosting if you find it less jarring.
I think most ISPs don't allow servers on residential, so one would be better off using a home cloud. Preferably one with blockchain to disrupt blocking or throttling.
I had an Exynos 5422, and when it came out it was a great card, however, nowadays, it's old generation - it consumes more and it's less performing than the latest archictures (A7x).
"Double the cores" is not a valid consideration - 4+ core configurations typically have 2/4 cores (the 5422 has 4) with a high-powered architecture, and the remainder with a low powered one.
Compare for example the XU4 with the N2 - the N2 is more powerful, and yet, it has less cores (4 hp. + 2 lp.) and requires no fan.
The RPi is an interesting configuration - they have 4 high-powered architecture cores (4x A72) only. It seems it doesn't require any fan.
Of course if one requires specific chipset/components, we're talking about specific use cases, which is another story.
It does at least need a heatsink. Though it will function without it, you may get temperature warnings, and it will run hot enough to significantly reduce component life. I've also hooked an old PC case fan to the GPIO pins or a USB port, and it runs slower (5V vs the 12 it expects) but does the job fine.
To me, the RPi is the choice only because every other single board I've used had so much less support than RPi does... I have a 3B+ running retropie and it's doing okay, but if this one can also do a decent job with h265 under kodi, I'll be very happy indeed.
Ordered a starter canakit with a couple extras, and looks like I won't see it until August. :-( ... I'll probably forget I ordered it by the time it comes.
Are you sure? I've worked with a myriad of ARM devices, and I would say that despite their small size, Hardkernel are one of the most responsive companies when I have had issues.
The OrangePi 3 at $40 is also pretty neat, PCIe 1x, 8GB onboard eMMC, 4x USB 3.0, Bluetooth 5, Wireless AC (pretty sure they beat Raspberry Pi to the punch on this...) and it has mainline kernel support: http://www.orangepi.org/Orange%20Pi%203/
I have been using Odroid XU4 for home server (home assistant), personal CCTV, controls IR blaster and other sensors for years, still running perfect without rebooting for months. I also have Pi 3 for Pi Hole, but honestly my Odroid XU4 is more stable than Pi 3.
I had ODROID C2, I don't know how things are now but I've returned mine as it hanged a lot and had lots of different issues. At same time I had 2x Raspberry Pi and it worked fine. This was couple of years ago.
The USB port on the Odroid HC2 is 2.0, but the SATA interface is connected to a USB3 but, as is the Gigabit Ethernet.
Furthermore, SATA and Ethernet are connected to individual USB3 busses, as opposed to earlier RPi designs where everything shared the same USB2 bus.
I haven't checked the RPi 4 specs yet, but i can imagine it's still the same layout, just a faster bus, which can be "just fine" - it should be plenty fast to saturate a Gigabit ethernet as well as the SSD/HDD IO required to do that.
I'd love to run something like this, but I recently switched to ZFS which recommends having a lot of RAM (my NAS has 4GB). It's what kept me from going the route of the Helios 4.
I'm so happy they haven't removed the composite video out in the headphone jack! If you didn't know, you just need a 3.5 mm TRRS connector - the pinout[0] looks like:
Playing your emulated video games on a real CRT TV so you don't have to use computationally-expensive CRT filters on your video output to get it to look even sort-of the way you remember? Can't think of another use but I assume they exist.
I have a raspberry with retroarch connected to an old CRT and an arcade stick. Old arcade games with a lot of dithering just don't look the same on an LCD.
(Some emulators now come with some decent CRT filters, but It's still not as good as a real CRT)
It is analog video. Meaning you can read the result without needing a HDMI decoder.
It also has much long range than HDMI (150 feet is cited compared with 50 feet for HDMI). You can also use boost extenders to transmit the feed over almost unlimited distances for little additional cost.
It is less useful at home, and more useful in industry, scientific, and experimental applications.
I've seen Pi's used in the art world for video installations. It can be quite a bit cheaper (and a different aesthetic) to get a pile of old CRTs than to get HDMI-capable TVs/monitors for such things.
IIRC, if you're building a handheld gaming device on the RPi Zero, your two choices for driving a small display are composite output or the SPI interface. The SPI interface has lower bandwidth, so some people use composite to eliminate tearing.
I setup a friend with a librelec raspi media player in his ~5 year old minivan that only has composite video in for the built in screen. Its not quite dead yet.
I'm very excited about these upgrades too (especially GigE), but as far as I can tell nothing on this news page specifies whether the Pi will also support HDR output as part of the 4K upgrade. That's most of the practical benefit of 4K - that 4K releases tend to come with HDR10 or DolbyVision support.
Anyone know if we can expect HDR output to work? If I knew it supported that I'd be purchasing one right now to upgrade my media center from my current Pi 3 setup.
Even the tech specs page says nothing about 10bit decoding, which is required for most real world 4K HEVC video.
"The 4B hardware is HDR capable, but software support has a dependency on the new Linux kernel frameworks merged by Intel developers (with help from Team LibreELEC/Kodi) in Linux 5.2 and a kernel bump will be needed to use them. Once the initial excitement and activity from the 4B launch calms down, serious work on HDR and transitioning Raspberry Pi over to the new GBM/V4L2 video pipeline can start."
The spec table says VideoCore VI. I really hope that is not a typo. I suspect it really is a VC6 because 2x4k is a big bump in pixel count and without a corresponding bump in fill-rate, perceived performance will drop.
[edit] looking at the benchmarks it's a modest boost. Now about twice the FPS of a PI-2 for Quake3 at equal resolution. Be interesting to see if something with more complex shaders changes the relative performance.
That's really too bad. It makes the 4K support useless for building an HTPC, which is a common use for the Pi. As far as I can determine, several of their competitors already support 10bit decoding, although specifics (about stable HDR support) are sometimes hard to come by.
I haven't been able to get HDR working on my desktop amdgpu + X11. I don't think it's supported in Wayland yet either (let me know if I'm wrong) and the devs in #mpv on freenode said they don't have HDR10 output support either (although mpv can do HDR10 tone-mapping).
For HDR videos, I still play them via my Windows box. I think the current MacOS supports HDR too (and if not, it will get support soon as they have that crazy new $6k HDR screen).
don't want to derail the RPi4 celebration, but for this specific purpose (media centre) I've been super happy with Nvidia Shield. You can often pick them up for $150 on a sale, less on ebay. 4k HDR, runs Android TV (some people have managed to get Ubuntu running on it too), VLC/Kodi work well, Moonlight works well for game streaming from another gaming PC with NVidia card. It's super zippy, too, and quite small (though bigger than RPi).
Yeah, the Shield seems to be the standard here. If we can get confirmation that the Pi works, we'll have an alternative that is much cheaper and is more useful as a general purpose platform!
> The power savings delivered by the smaller process geometry have allowed us to replace Cortex-A53 with the much more powerful, out-of-order, Cortex-A72 core; this can execute more instructions per clock, yielding performance increases over Raspberry Pi 3B+ of between two and four times, depending on the benchmark.
Looks like the Pi 4 will be vulnerable to Spectre. That's unfortunate, since it seems like this is quite an upgrade otherwise.
> ARM has reported that the majority of their processors are not vulnerable, and published a list of the specific processors that are affected by the Spectre vulnerability: Cortex-R7, Cortex-R8, Cortex-A8, Cortex-A9, Cortex-A15, Cortex-A17, Cortex-A57, Cortex-A72, Cortex-A73 and ARM Cortex-A75 cores.
>ARM has reported that the majority of their processors are not vulnerable, and published a list of the specific processors that are affected by the Spectre vulnerability: Cortex-R7, Cortex-R8, Cortex-A8, Cortex-A9, Cortex-A15, Cortex-A17, Cortex-A57, Cortex-A72, Cortex-A73 and ARM Cortex-A75 cores.
So, "most not vulnerable", then they proceed to list almost their entire lineup as vulnerable.
I'm super excited as well. I figured out the secret sauce to get a low latency kernel build I was able to get down to 20ms latency but I'm excited to see if this can't get down to 10ms even though 20ms is acceptable low audio latency, already with only 1 gig of ram on a pi3 ardour is usable for multitrack recording, excited to see how this does with 4 gigs.
I recently connected a midi keyboard to our Pi3 and ran Timidity for synthesis. It worked, but unfortunately the notes happen about half a second after you press a key, making it rather useless. Strange, since if you dump the midi events themselves to the console they appear to happen immediately.
I tried teaking alsa and pulseaudio settings, no luck. Also installed jack but never got sound from it. Eight hours on the weekend wasted with nothing to show for it. Any ideas on how to fix this?
I installed a low-latency kernel on my desktop machine with a midi keyboard over USB, got horrible performance until I got off of Pulseaudio.
I had some difficulty with Jack, but Alsa worked great. The main thing is you can't run Alsa and Jack at the same time. Once I was no longer using Pulseaudio, a lot of my problems went away -- I think it's just a really slow interface.
In audio that's still acceptable. In our games we usually run at either 40ms or 60ms audio frame size(which means you are getting at least that much latency before hearing the sound for your action).
Readit News
USB 3.0! Gigabit Ethernet! WiFi 802.11ac, BT 5.0, 4GB RAM! 4K! $55 at most?!
What the!? How the??! I know I'm not maintaining decorum at Hacker News, but I am SO mighty, MIGHTY excited!
I'm setting up a VPN to hook this (when I get it) to my VPS and then do a LOT of fun stuff back and forth, remotely, and with the other RPI at my folks.
Using the Pi as a file server can be a bit flaky. The ethernet controller was an USB one, and was neither really stable or took load very well. The new PHY on a dedicated link is probably the single biggest improvement with this new revision.
The HEVC is a bit unexpected considering the high license fees and general uncertainties. Let's hope the documentation can be released as well.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/conf...
So unsure at this stage, but that may well be the case for any license fees regarding HVEC. Heck, if they have absorbed those costs into the base price - I'd be utterly amazed.
I just setup my RockPro64 with 4GB, also PCIex4, have an SSD, going to setup a raid at somepoint when I get it all figured out. The board was a bit more expensive than the pi4, but I am interested in playing around with it.
But it looks like its back ordered for awhile
Hmm... that explains a problem I had with a pi of mine. Every time the 10/100 switch it was connected to rebooted, the pi would lose its ethernet link until rebooted. Never had this with other machines on the same switch.
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Does it have PoE? Having to deal with one less cable would be nice.
Especially given that the latest spec, IEEE 802.3bt from September 2018, now allows for up to 100W per port:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_over_Ethernet
https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/poe-hat/
It doesn't draw anywhere near that. 15W max (for accessories), and 7W in heavy use (without anything other than the board itself).
The big shortcoming of the other Raspberry Pis I have is power. Plug anything into it and you risk undervoltage problems (even with the official supply)
I hope the new power input will stablize things.Would be nice to build a NAS with as few cables as possible.
(I speak as someone who sucks at programming and doesn't spend a 1/100th of the time learning the latest as I used too as a teen. So having the community around to help with my latest project that I need something more than a microcontroller for, is immensely worthwhile. Obviously those who don't need these types of spillovers would probably be better served with other hardware.)
- New SoC puts out more heat. Active cooling more important now.
- Video playback at 4K requires H.265
- Micro-HDMI cables now needed.
- Draws more power.
Other than that, looks like a major performance boost.
Not really a con IMO, I haven't seen anything on a 4k bluray encoded in h.264, everything seems to be 265. The microHDMI is kind of a bummer though.
I actually wonder if the A72 CPUs onboard are fast enough to do software h.264 4k decode. They might be.
Could you provide some details? The USB-adapted ethernet & lack of wifi sounds limiting for a NAS.
It sets up systemd and iptables and generates all certs and keys and wraps them up into tidy, per-client .ovpn files
Dead Comment
I have had gigabit internet for a few years now, and every day on average, I torrent a Blu-Ray image onto my main computer. However, subsequently moving the Blu-Ray to my Raspberry Pi 3 media center is always slow on two counts: 1) ethernet from the router to the Pi was limited to 10/100 speeds, and 2) the Pi could push large files to an attached hard drive only over a USB 2.0 port. Consequently, on a Raspberry Pi 1–3 it takes an hour just to move a high-definition file around one’s home network! On a Pi 4, it looks like one can just put the torrent client directly on the media center.
The board is a bit more expensive, but you can probably get it faster than the pi4 at the moment.
The Dietpi community seems to be pretty great, any issues I ran into were answered pretty quickly
I put together a NAS/Plex box with a Kaby Lake Celeron and some hard drives, but I was thinking of splitting it out into separate NFS and Plex servers.
Keep in mind that you are in a very small world there... most people alive today will never have internet that fast, personally i've never had a connection above 6 Mbits in the middle of a city, and I know that's likely above the median globally (keep in mind average is a poor metric due to connections like yours, SDL is still the primary type of endpoint for homes)
My point being, the previous generations USB based ethernet still has massive headroom for the vast majority of peoples internet.
The model 3B+ already had this though.
Just read theverge review on how the Pi struggles to play a video full screen, even if resolution is 480p. How are then people using it as a media center?
Are you sure the writer didn't use the board the wrong way? Some people still believe that videos should be streamed after being transcoded because that is the only way to watch them on their ridiculously limited smart TV which lacks the necessary codecs to watch them the right way. Of course doing this over WiFi would make the problem even worse. To optimize network usage, videos should be kept encoded until they reach the player so that the network won't be clogged. If you use the PI to read the movie as a file over a shared SMB or NFS directory, the network usage is so low that you could watch like 20 different movies on 20 different players on the same home network at the same time. Probably even more.
The PI 3 (and to some extent probably the PI4 too) is still behind many other boards in other contexts (openness, performance, price) but playing video is surely not one of them.
tl;dr they "built a gaming pc" with a "wireless anti static bracelet", RAM installed in single channel, backwards PSU, terrible parts choices... don't trust the verge.
Mind, this is specifically running under Kodi, which is optimized as a media center, and is NOT running also a full desktop environment. Attmepting to do the same in, say, the stripped down Chromium browser was an exercise in frustration. That's always been a major limitation of the 3D acceleration in the Pi, as the libraries took a long while to mature and were always a bit hacky.
The announcement for proper OpenGL support and compositing in the desktop environment is huge for me. It seems like it'll finally push the Pi up into "workshop computer" territory that, while underpowered, should be just capable enough to run some of my always on operations and act as a lightweight CAD station for small parts. I ordered one as soon as I woke up and saw the announcement, and we'll see how well that works in practice.
The “more powerful computer” is a laptop, and it is only being used for torrenting the films because it has gigabit ethernet. I don’t want to have to leave it on all the time, and sometimes it is still packed in its case when I want to sit down and watch a film. Storing the films on a hard drive attached to the Pi is a lot more convenient.
It does suffice on average, but the bitrate changes a lot within the same file.
(The upgrades look great, just my attention span is not so great)
I've got:
* A Zero W hooked up to a PM2.5 to do air quality monitoring in the house. Just bought a couple more sensors for it (VOC, eCO2, etc), but haven't hooked them up yet.
* A 3B+ running the UniFi controller for my home network.
* One is running a custom Hue automation I built to shift the color temperature of the lights throughout the day.
* One is built into an internet connected dog treat dispenser I built as a gift.
* A rather dusty Pi is running CNCjs so I can have a decent interface to my cheap grbl CNC.
* And finally I have a Pi running OctoPrint for my 3D printer.
And that's just the ones currently running. I've got two more in progress. One to automate an exhaust fan based on inside and outside temperatures. Another is destined for the garage where it will replace the not-so-great MyQ "smart" functionality of the garage door opener.
To each their own I suppose, but I've been consuming RasPis like candy. $60 all-in gets you a fairly beefy platform with almost all the I/O you could require and a vast ecosystem of software and HATs. Honestly their only downside is that at some point I'll have to reconfigure my home network when I start exhausting my current internal /24 with 200 RasPis.
Do you have any resources on how to set up something like that?
Ooooh do you have the code up somewhere for this? I would love to set it up at home :)
We have neighbors that smoke, and sometimes based upon wind patterns it blows into our yard. Any idea if they have sensors that can pick up this sort of thing so I can close our windows?
What software are you running? I have been using Dietpi for almost all my projects. Plex comes native( as an option to install) and a bunch of other software.
Do you even need a RPI for this? Some of these seem overengineered.
What's the unifi controller?
Maybe it's a personality flaw, but I get plenty of satisfaction from just reading blog write-ups if things I could have done with my tech junk, without all the associated time invested.
It's much easier to vicariously enjoy projects like these, which is why I think drawer-dwelling is an inevitable destiny for most of these widgets.
That's also why I'm tring microcontrollers, it's back to low level, less shiny projects, but mentally saner.
I'm sure it's a 'flaw' that most of us have.
I also like getting grand plans for a (hardware) project, ordering the parts from Ali express, then losing interest before the parts have arrived, so they still end up in 'the drawer'.
My wife refers to this as the raspberry pile.
[1] https://pi-hole.net/
It essentially blocks tracking and advertisements on all devices, not just my computers with ad block. Just need to keep the block lists up to date every couple weeks, but it's honestly great.
One downside to the 4 is that it is moving from the low power to laptop realm in terms of power consumption which was my main interest in them. If top performance is what you care about, the Raspberry Pi is the wrong place to go looking for it.
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I've been - cross my fingers - lucky with MicroSD cards (usually Samsung, sometimes SanDisk), but having USB3 on the new model is quite the game-changer.
ETA: I do have rsync backing up my Pi setups, so losing a MicroSD would be merely annoying rather than catastrophic.
- Half the RAM but double the cores. I'm waiting for some benchmarks to see if the RPi4 is faster and by how much.
- Also Gigabit Ethernet and it works great. My downloads are always at 108-111MB/s for the whole transfer.
- Not USB 3.0 but has "oldschool" SATA through an internal USB-2-SATA adapter. It's at least more compact, otherwise the RPi4 with an external USB 3.0 drive will probably work even better.
- works with a normal 12V power supply, which could be lying around already, from older external drives.
Not to disrespect the RPi4, as I'll be getting one of them too very soon.
Can we just start calling them servers again?
* Home Lab :: Running a partial/full enterprise IT stack for fun and education.
* Home Server :: Running primarily internal services like file storage, backups, media streaming, home automation, maybe some light networking.
* Home Cloud :: Running primarily external services on the public internet to replace 3rd party SaaS services. More often than not this is done with a VPS provider rather than physical hardware in your home.
So maybe you find the terminology annoying since everything is cloud these days but it's genuinely useful to us folks in the forums. You can also call "home cloud" selfhosting if you find it less jarring.
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"Double the cores" is not a valid consideration - 4+ core configurations typically have 2/4 cores (the 5422 has 4) with a high-powered architecture, and the remainder with a low powered one.
Compare for example the XU4 with the N2 - the N2 is more powerful, and yet, it has less cores (4 hp. + 2 lp.) and requires no fan.
The RPi is an interesting configuration - they have 4 high-powered architecture cores (4x A72) only. It seems it doesn't require any fan.
Of course if one requires specific chipset/components, we're talking about specific use cases, which is another story.
Ordered a starter canakit with a couple extras, and looks like I won't see it until August. :-( ... I'll probably forget I ordered it by the time it comes.
Even don't think about it - shitty support from vendor. They don't care about updates in general.
Of couse, such SBCs have an expiry date (which is also official), but this applies to any vendor, not only to them.
Additionally, they're one of the most engaging companies when it comes to community - just check their forums and see for yourself.
I say that as both a Gentoo and Kali ARM dev
Needless to say, I won't be reading that link.
Wordpress.com wouldn't have done that with your content. Just saying.
Furthermore, SATA and Ethernet are connected to individual USB3 busses, as opposed to earlier RPi designs where everything shared the same USB2 bus.
I haven't checked the RPi 4 specs yet, but i can imagine it's still the same layout, just a faster bus, which can be "just fine" - it should be plenty fast to saturate a Gigabit ethernet as well as the SSD/HDD IO required to do that.
T - Left Channel Audio
R - Right Channel Audio
R - Ground
S - Composite Video Out
[0] https://www.raspberrypi-spy.co.uk/2014/07/raspberry-pi-model...
Google "audio video jack".
Update: Oh, I just read the linked article, apparently these cables aren't as standardized as I thought. There are some links in the comments.
I have a raspberry with retroarch connected to an old CRT and an arcade stick. Old arcade games with a lot of dithering just don't look the same on an LCD.
(Some emulators now come with some decent CRT filters, but It's still not as good as a real CRT)
It also has much long range than HDMI (150 feet is cited compared with 50 feet for HDMI). You can also use boost extenders to transmit the feed over almost unlimited distances for little additional cost.
It is less useful at home, and more useful in industry, scientific, and experimental applications.
The SPI driver readme has a lot of details about its limitations and tradeoffs. https://github.com/juj/fbcp-ili9341
I'm very excited about these upgrades too (especially GigE), but as far as I can tell nothing on this news page specifies whether the Pi will also support HDR output as part of the 4K upgrade. That's most of the practical benefit of 4K - that 4K releases tend to come with HDR10 or DolbyVision support.
Anyone know if we can expect HDR output to work? If I knew it supported that I'd be purchasing one right now to upgrade my media center from my current Pi 3 setup.
Even the tech specs page says nothing about 10bit decoding, which is required for most real world 4K HEVC video.
> H.265 (4kp60 decode), H264 (1080p60 decode, 1080p30 encode)
https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-4-model-b/...
"The 4B hardware is HDR capable, but software support has a dependency on the new Linux kernel frameworks merged by Intel developers (with help from Team LibreELEC/Kodi) in Linux 5.2 and a kernel bump will be needed to use them. Once the initial excitement and activity from the 4B launch calms down, serious work on HDR and transitioning Raspberry Pi over to the new GBM/V4L2 video pipeline can start."
Full article: https://libreelec.tv/2019/06/libreelec-9-2-alpha1-rpi4b/
[edit] looking at the benchmarks it's a modest boost. Now about twice the FPS of a PI-2 for Quake3 at equal resolution. Be interesting to see if something with more complex shaders changes the relative performance.
For HDR videos, I still play them via my Windows box. I think the current MacOS supports HDR too (and if not, it will get support soon as they have that crazy new $6k HDR screen).
Looks like the Pi 4 will be vulnerable to Spectre. That's unfortunate, since it seems like this is quite an upgrade otherwise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_(security_vulnerabilit...
> ARM has reported that the majority of their processors are not vulnerable, and published a list of the specific processors that are affected by the Spectre vulnerability: Cortex-R7, Cortex-R8, Cortex-A8, Cortex-A9, Cortex-A15, Cortex-A17, Cortex-A57, Cortex-A72, Cortex-A73 and ARM Cortex-A75 cores.
So, "most not vulnerable", then they proceed to list almost their entire lineup as vulnerable.
These PR guys sure are stretching it.
I tried teaking alsa and pulseaudio settings, no luck. Also installed jack but never got sound from it. Eight hours on the weekend wasted with nothing to show for it. Any ideas on how to fix this?
I had some difficulty with Jack, but Alsa worked great. The main thing is you can't run Alsa and Jack at the same time. Once I was no longer using Pulseaudio, a lot of my problems went away -- I think it's just a really slow interface.
I mostly worked off of http://www.tedfelix.com/linux/linux-midi.html
Just recently got into audio processing, and I'm finding this stuff really interesting.