So, how many people are after a Raspberry Pi?

[roobarb!]

There is CEC support on OpenELEC and Raspbmc but so far I can't get any TV remote to work with the Pi (something that even Leonardo's cat can do). I'm not sure if there is any further set up required, such as keymapping - time to hit Google methinks!

What TV do you have? I've got a Sony and have had no luck with the CEC stuff so far either, despite the Pi telling me that a CEC-compatible device has been connected. I've not found any documentation about it either, although to be fair, I've not looked terribly hard.

I think The CEC thing needs to be enabled on the TV's own settings as well. I'm not sure if the kitchen TV has this ability and I'm not at home to check the manual. I'll investigate this evening.

Guess I need to dig out the telly manual!

[hawsey]

CEC didn't work for me on a Samsung LCD tv about 6 years old. But a friend has a newer Samsung tv and his worked fine so maybee they changed standards like usb1 /usb 2 etc.
Let us know if you get it going
Is there not a setting to enable in Openelec to enable Cec?

[roobarb!]

Is there not a setting to enable in Openelec to enable Cec?

I think so, but I also think it's on by default. Next time I hook up the Pi I'll take a look.

[gegs]

Unfortunately, unlike Leonardo's cat I've been unable to use my TV remote with the Pi because the TV doesn't support HDMI-CEC.

Bummer!

[gegs]

I've got RaspBMC running beautifully on the Raspberry Pi, especially after overclocking slightly, and it makes a fabulous kitchen media centre. It outputs video to a flat screen TV which also takes VGA from my computer - one monitor, two purposes. It's great for googling stuff and SSH to the Pi because all I need to do is change the video source and I can check modifications immediately.

I've got the Hulu plugin running well after changing default DNS settings to my UnoDNS ones in /etc/resolv.conf ; I also had to make the file immutable so that it wouldn't rewrite itself on reboot. I think you can leave /etc/resolv.conf alone and edit /etc/network/interfaces instead.

I created a root login for the Pi so that I didn't need to worry about permissions when editing files using WinSCP. The instructions to create a root password are on the RaspBMC website: http://www.raspbmc.com/wiki/user/root-access/

My next project is to set up LMS on the Pi. Somebody on one of the Pi forums said that the instructions on the following page works with RaspBMC, even though they were written for Raspian: http://allthingspi.webspace.virginmedia.com/lms.php

I'm hoping that the LMS install works because I'd love to use the Pi as my default Squeeze Server; it's connected by wired ethernet and hopefully it will be more stable than LMS running wi-fi on the Joggler (even though that is pretty good most of the time). Connecting to my NAS might also be easier - we'll see!

--- RE-EDIT ---
Despite a Raspberry Pi forum posting that standard Debian methods of upgrading rendered Raspbmc unbootable, I tweeted Sam Nazarko (the 18-year-old wunderkind maintainer of Raspbmc) and asked if the method of installing LMS from http://allthingspi.webspace.virginmedia.com/lms.php would work. Within a minute he assured me it would.

[gegs]

Well I installed as much as I could, according to the instructions from the link in my previous post, to get LMS running on the Pi but it failed on patching the perl module and I think network-manager failed to update. I can start the server on the Pi and I get no errors when I execute the command, but I still can't connect to the server.

Unfortunately, I don't know enough about linux to fix it.

--- EDIT ---
I tried an apt-get-update again and I now get network-manager errors that won't allow me to proceed further. I think I'll recreate my Raspbmc card to rid myself of unnecessary stuff due to the failed LMS project

[gegs]

Tweeted Sam Nazarko - He says I should re-install Raspbmc then hold back the network-manager package with the command 'aptitude hold network-manager' before updating and running the scripts to install LMS and its dependencies. He says failure was due to a bug that he's now fixed in SVN and it should all run smoothly on the final release.

I must get a development SD card to try all this stuff without endangering my finely tweaked version of Raspbmc on the Pi.

I'll keep this thread updated with my 'Raspberry Pi as a Logitech Media Server' successes or failures.

[gegs]

I think my network-manager problems when updating core files may have been because I had made /etc/resolv.conf file immutable in order to preserve my UnoDNS server settings*. I'm sure this file is normally re-written by network-manager on reboot and I think it seeks to access the file during update.

I updated Raspbmc to the latest nightly (as of yesterday) and it screwed up some of the Confluence interface graphics. Rebooting the Pi I was then stuck in an infinite boot loop. I'm getting a bit weary of re-installing and configuring my plugins after every tinker so I'm going to leave everything alone for now. The final release version of Raspbmc isn't far off, so I'll wait until then and do all my tinkering on a card kept exclusively for development/tinkering purposes. I'm still hopeful that I'll get the LMS project to work but it's on hold at the moment.

* EDIT - Nope it wasn't that. I found a spare SD card and tried again - this time without modifying Raspbmc before attempting the LMS install. I still got the network-manager error.

[gegs]

Although my project to run LMS alongside Raspbmc is now on hold (at least until the final Raspbmc release) the tinkerer in me just wouldn't take a rest.

Last night I installed Raspbmc to a USB stick and the difference was remarkable. It was especially noticeable with TVCatchup which used to take around 30 seconds or so to start up and the EPG load times were very sluggish. Running from USB TVCatchup opens in around 2 to 3 seconds and the EPG loads pretty quickly.

Most other addons running from the SD card weren't as slow to load as TVcatchup although load times on everything have had a boost when I switched to a USB stick. Streaming video performance is much the same with SD and USB systems; internet speed and available ram buffers are more significant factors than the overall speed of the system with regard to playback.

[gegs]

Well, my Raspberry Pi TVCatchup joy was short-lived. The Raspbmc final release doesn't play well with it. The streams start off OK but after about a minute or so there will be a video glitch that throws sound and picture badly out of sync and it doesn't ever recover. I've raised it as an issue on the TVCatchup forum.

Every other addon I've tried works well, it's only TVCatchup that suffers. It might be the Pi-specific OMXPlayer that is causing the problem. I don't know if I could install something like Mplayer and use that for TVCatchup only, just to check whether it is the default player that's causing the problem. TVC works well in XBMC on my Apple TV2; I occasionally see the same video glitches but they don't interfere with sync on ATV2.

[dwl99]

I've got OpenELEC on my Acer Revo R3700 but live TV is quite choppy - it seems that OpenELEC doesn't particularly play nicely with the ION2 GPU. I was thinking about going down the Raspberry Pi route. I assume that I could install RaspBMC on the Pi and hook up a USB dual DVB-T tuner via a powered hub? Is it feasible to get the Pi to record to a NAS?

[gegs]

I've not used the PVR function on the Pi but it is present in Frodo. I don't see why you couldn't record to a NAS although I've only tried streaming from my NAS and it works well. It's definitely worth purchasing the MPEG2 and VC-1 codecs too - it only costs £3.60 for both and the VC-1 will allow you to play WMV files (at amazingly good quality, in my experience).

Give it a go. If nothing else, it's another cheap toy to fiddle around with, especially if you have the cables, SD card and power source already. The Android and iPad XBMC remotes worked "out of the box" and the Raspbmc settings tool is great for setting up the additional codecs and setting overclocking options.

My system is connected by ethernet so I can't comment on wi-fi dongle performance.

[hawsey]

I got my Pi out of the box again a couple of nights ago after a while away from it as i wanted to see how well openelec and rapbmc had come along .
After making the initial mistake of using a usb power supply with not enough power i managed to get my images to boot up , but I was not able to get a network connection however even with a cable on either image
so tonight i had a Google about and decided to update the PI firmware using Raspbian Wheezy i think its called and a great tool written by a coder called Hexxeh , the Pi booted no problem in to Raspbian and i managed to update the kernal and firmware using others instructions.
Result Openelec booting fine and now the CEC is working as the remote for my TV works it , this was not the case last time i tried and i thought it was the age of my TV .
Quite a successful night

[dwl99]

Definitely going to get one of these. OpenELEC wouldn't play nicely with my dual-tuner DVB-T stick or the ION2 GPU in my nettop so I had to abandon it in the end. The Pi sounds like a great toy to fiddle about with.

[gegs]

I'm using Raspbmc which is pretty good and optimized to run only XBMC. OpenELEC is good too but the Raspbmc settings manager is a deal-breaker for me; it's a really easy GUI to change options, add codecs and overclock without having to SSH to the Pi to change files and permissions. You don't need a mouse or keyboard to operate it or start it up, the XBMC Android or iOS apps do the trick and you can even control it with your TV remote if your TV supports HDMI-CEC (which mine doesn't - not the one connected to the Pi anyway).

I daresay the tweaker in me will want to experiment with other distros and install other software alongside XBMC (you can use the Pi as a Logitech Media Server) but I'll do this on another card. Raspbmc is really for the end user who just wants XBMC and wants to run it without too much technical intervention.

[hawsey]

@geggs the CEC only started working on my PI after I updated to the latest firmware and kernel.
Its an old Samsung LCD tv and it worked fine on a friends newer model

[gegs]

@geggs the CEC only started working on my PI after I updated to the latest firmware and kernel.
Its an old Samsung LCD tv and it worked fine on a friends newer model

It only works if your TV has the circuitry to handle HDMI-CEC and mine doesn't, unfortunately; it says so in the manual and experience proves it's correct. My TV in the lounge does but I'm using the Pi with my kitchen TV to avoid having to run an aerial to it. The TV runs Raspbmc through HDMI and switches to being a computer monitor via the PC connection.

[hawsey]

Ahh I see, mine says it does but wouldnt work on old firmware / images but does on new ones just thought it might be the same issue.
Having problems with openelec now on Frodo, if you play some music then do a photo slideshow it crashes it and re boots, my openelec Frodo on my acer revo 3610 is doing the same as well so it could be this version of openelec.
Im going to give raspbmc a whirl tonight, do you use an sd card or a usb stick to boot your image?

[gegs]

Ahh I see, mine says it does but wouldnt work on old firmware / images but does on new ones just thought it might be the same issue.
Having problems with openelec now on Frodo, if you play some music then do a photo slideshow it crashes it and re boots, my openelec Frodo on my acer revo 3610 is doing the same as well so it could be this version of openelec.
Im going to give raspbmc a whirl tonight, do you use an sd card or a usb stick to boot your image?

I use both. Raspbmc has an "install to USB" option but the boot loader remains on an SD card. The Pi needs to boot from SD.

Use a small SD card for booting, no point in wasting a large capacity one. I noticed a big speed advantage when I swapped from an SD based system to a USB one, although I must admit that even the card based versions are zippier now on the Pi with continual improvements being made to the code. The most noticeable speed improvement was with the EPG version of the TVCatchup addon. Loading the EPG was pretty slow with SD but impressively swift with USB. Having said that, I'm now using the non-EPG version because I find it simpler and less prone to freezing.

If you have an iPhone. iPod Touch or iPad, I'd recommend installing zaTelnet - a Telnet/SSH client for iOS devices. I can execute commands on the Pi, Joggler and Apple TV without having to fire up the PC - the most useful so far being 'reboot' if the Pi freezes, usually when trying new addons. It's really useful - and free!

Sam Nazarko hasn't rolled the 12.1 XBMC update into Raspbmc yet but you can get it by installing the 22 March nightly (which can be done using the GUI in Raspbmc Settings).

[dwl99]

So it would make sense to boot the Pi from a small-capacity SD card & use a (say) 64GB USB stick to host RasbBMC and recorded TV files?