As we all know the Raspberry Pi is a low cost mini computer that occupies a very small form factor. It runs on Linux and there is an enthusiastic community of supporters.
I have elected to acquire a Pi to replace my satellite decoder box and dish for FTA TBN channels. Previously I had entered into a contract with Instal-Life in Australia in respect of a satellite decoder box and dish for the TBN channels, particularly Hillsong Channel. I had believed this contract was rent to own but have since discovered it is rent only and as the contract term has completed and the channels are available on the Internet for no charge I have determined the best option is to return the equipment and replace it with the Pi. Both this company and others offer the equipment for sale and it is of regret to me that I was unaware that an 18 month contract with this company was only for rental as they did offer a 6 month contract with a discount for purchasing after that contract period. TBN Pacific do offer the equipment for sale and since I do not have the means to purchase from Instal-Life and have no wish to do so because of the misunderstanding and other factors, any future installation of this type of equipment would be for the basis of full purchase at the outset.
To make a Pi work, apart from the basic board, it needs a case, power supply and SD card. At the moment I can make do without a case and have the other items to hand as my budget is very limited at present. It will run the Raspbian operating system which is a lite edition of Debian which will prove very satisfactory and enable it to perform other tasks. It will be interesting to see how it would handle video decoding. As it may be known, the key issue with Google's VP8 and VP9 codecs as enshrined in the WebM format container is that these codecs can only be supported by recent CPUs. This is another reason why swapping serverpc and mediapc around would be a great idea for the living room computer desk as mediapc has an older CPU that doesn't have hardware support for these codecs and consequently has difficulty in playing WebM container files.
When I have the Pi the main thing I expect to be doing is setting it up to automatically open a web browser to Hillsong Channel from the TBN website and that will be its sole purpose for the time being. Recording is not directly available but SimpleScreenRecorder can handle this if needed. The main difference will be the picture quality available over the internet. There is an option obviously to buy the satellite gear at a later time and have this option available again in future and I would consider this as this option is not dependent on the internet and always gives a high quality picture.
Since writing originally yesterday Instal-Life has offered to sell me the satellite gear at a significant discount so I am continuing with the agreement for another six months until it is paid off and at that stage I own the gear and do not have to make any more payments. The Raspberry Pi is also still coming so I expect to set that up as a sort of STB hooked to the TV probably that will be able to play live videos from Youtube etc.
Since writing originally yesterday Instal-Life has offered to sell me the satellite gear at a significant discount so I am continuing with the agreement for another six months until it is paid off and at that stage I own the gear and do not have to make any more payments. The Raspberry Pi is also still coming so I expect to set that up as a sort of STB hooked to the TV probably that will be able to play live videos from Youtube etc.
