Vocal Voices

Yesterday I received my new Pi3. It's supposed to be a decent speed increase on the older Pi2 and I thought I'd just set it up and see how it went.

I use them for media streamers rather than the programming and development machines as I have no need for the latter. Although they can do both.

So £30 for the Pi, £6.5 for the case. It uses a micro usb phone style charger and I have loads of those. Although it needs a 2.4 amp feed and I have fewer of them. I also have 8gb spare flash cards which you need to set it uip, network cables, remote controllers (£5 from Ebay if you don't have one) and HDMI cables. So for me it's pretty cheap. If you don't the Pi hut has a media centre kit which comes with case, cables and a power supply for £50. You only need your remote control then.

Anyway, I set it up using a spare keyboard and mouse and connected it to my server to update the library. I did a bit of checking and I have around 800 "movie" size images plus about 400 individual TV episodes. It takes a while.

Then I bought my MPEG decoder key (for hardware decoding of movies, it makes it faster), for the requisite £2.4. I'd tried my Pi2 without the key and it really struggled with DVD's.

So whilst I was waiting for my key to arrive (overnight), I thought I'd try it out and see how quick it really was. First impressions were good, the menu system was really fast, significantly faster than the Pi2 and it's only supposed to be a 40% or so increase over that. It felt more like 400%.

Then I started testing movies. DVD's on which the menu's had issues played perfectly. So I tried a full 1080p bluray movie image and it played perfectly. In fact everything I tried worked perfectly. So £2.4 spent I didn't need. However I entered the decoder key anyway.

So, it looks like my Pi media machines have had a really good boost for a small outlay. The old Pi2 used to get a bit slow when updating the library on restart. The Pi3 just does everything at once. Just like a PC does.

I must admit I'm exceedingly impressed with them.

Why didn't I think outside the box?

The other week a mate gave me a boxful of CDs and DVDs due to a house move. My ancient CD player had died so I bought a new all-sinning, all-dancing Sony job.

It works fine and with my old 5:1 sound system speakers sounds great, but for a fraction of the cost I could have got a PI 2 or 3 and had a fantastic upgradeable system for about the same price. Swapping out parts in the future would have been as cheap as chips whereas with the Sony the best I can get is their firmware upgrades, if they exist.

If they exist being exactly the point... I've found that older consumer hardware firmware is stuck in the 2000's, never to be updated again.

The Pi also supports a CD or DVD player in a USB caddy. Or a USB hard drive if you chose to rip them all.

I was introduced to the Pi by my brother and I've found it quite useful. Mrs S has been grumbling about the Pi at home as it has no off switch. I found a PiMedia case (£50 off or so it says), at £20. It has an external power supply and an on off switch. However it's for the A series Pi (Pi 1) and the Pi3 does not fit so well.

A pair of nail clippers and 5 minutes of effort and the corner locators are now corner supports and it works fine. I have 4 x Pi devices now. I'll probably do Pi3 upgrades to the Pi2's eventually. They are just so useful.

We have 2 of the original pis doing media work too. It just works so well.
Nice to know the new Pi is so much faster.

Weka the Pi2 was fast enough. The Pi3 is quite significantly faster.

Although I've been seeing some issues with it "going away", when left on for long periods of time. I may have to invest in a heatsink which would say more about the technology changes than the speed. Neither of the original Pi's needed one.