Well now that I have this thing I have to find a use for it, and that use is proving to be best made out in hooking it to the TV and playing live Youtube content. It does however turn out able to play some existing video content, provided that you use the built in omxplayer software to do this, because it uses the OpenMAX standard for the ARM platform to hardware decode a lot of different video codecs. The documentation for omxplayer is here, which has to be invoked from the command line in a terminal session - it cannot be started from a GUI file manager type of application. There is no mouse (GUI) user interface but the documentation lists the following keypresses that will be recognised:
1 decrease speed 2 increase speed < rewind > fast forward z show info j previous audio stream k next audio stream i previous chapter o next chapter n previous subtitle stream m next subtitle stream s toggle subtitles w show subtitles x hide subtitles d decrease subtitle delay (- 250 ms) f increase subtitle delay (+ 250 ms) q exit omxplayer p / space pause/resume - decrease volume + / = increase volume left arrow seek -30 seconds right arrow seek +30 seconds down arrow seek -600 seconds up arrow seek +600 seconds
So far the capability in playback of my previously downloaded content (over the network from mediapc) is quite satisfactory. Of course, audio playback (music) will be less demanding on the hardware.
Although at the moment I am not planning to use the Pi for playing content from files, since it does not have sufficient inbuilt or connected storage, the capability is interesting to evaluate. I plan at the moment to stick with playing live Youtube streamed content. One aspect of the Pi which would be superior to mediapc and the old E350 boards I have used for media playback previously (like the one that was in my bedroom) is decoding VP8 content (the codec used in WebM containers) which the older Intel/AMD x86 CPUs don't support at hardware level.
Anyway the Pi was easy to get going with a 8 GB microSD card I had previously flashed Raspbian on to. An Apple Ipad USB 10 watt power adapter is able to run it. One day it will have a case (at the moment it is just the bare board) and perhaps the proper power supply.
