Raspberry Pi as Livestream Player [4]... Or Conventional HTPC?

So after recent posts talking about Raspberry Pi possibilities I am probably going to forgo using my Pi as a media player because I have pulled out an old Intel DB75EN board that used to be a desktop computer here and it plays videos very well. So that old computer can be repurposed. It needs a smaller chassis than a tower to fit well into the bedside cabinet. The Silverstone Milo ML03 low profile desktop case is an interesting one to look at because it can use a full size power supply, unlike most such chassis which use TFX power supplies.  So this will be considered as an option. The spare desktop board I have will fit in it, and although it doesn't come with a power supply, I have a few spares around. Silverstone has especially targeted the HTPC market and produces a considerable range of different chassis, some of which are in the Mini ITX form factor, and others like this one will fit regular MicroATX boards.

It has an interesting design feature in that the internal PSU fan, which normally draws air out of the case, is relegated to drawing its own air supply through a grille in the bottom of this chassis, which is OK and potentially reduces noise from the fan, but also means it won't be cooling the inside of the system. That means an extra fan may be needed in the chassis, and due to its size 80 mm fans would need to be used, the potential downside of these being they tend to run at a higher speed and make more noise. In this instance with the low demand on the system I would try running it without a chassis fan on the assumption with the CPU vent in the top that hopefully there should be enough ventilation given that the system isn't under especially high load. However if fans are needed it can support more than one being installed which makes it possible they might be able to move enough air without making too much noise.

Reading this reviews for this product, any small case has its limitations, there are always going to be some compromises when cutting case size down and making it possible to fit everything in. This chassis is wider than some of the other desktop cases I have seen, but also not as deep, so it is swings and roundabouts. Being able to fit a regular ATX power supply (maximum depth of 140 mm) is a big plus as they are cheap and easy to come by and the smaller ones, apart from being harder to find, in some cases are also less reliable. However its front panel USB ports are USB3, and since the board I have doesn't have USB3 on the board, I would have to get a Silverstone adapter cable to adapt these. With a specialised chassis like this one, do your homework. Get the manual for it off the website and have a really good look at the measurements and other information to be sure everything will fit inside. In my case it looks like the adapter cable mentioned above is all that would be needed and, especially as I would not put an optical drive inside, it would go together OK, with no accessory cards and just the standard CPU cooler. But someone who needed extra cooling solutions or lots of drives might struggle. I would find a SSD desirable as well because of less noise and higher reliability, but that costs extra $$ of course.

In the past I also used a Mini-ITX system, part of the attraction being that I could buy a Mini-ITX board with integrated CPU at a lower cost than a separate board and CPU. However such boards are not really that easy to come by, or cheap, these days, and the best deal you can really get on Mini-ITX is an ASUS board for $150 and then you still need to buy a CPU for another $100. Since I can get a microATX board for about $100, it is really a premium price for Mini-ITX plus the extra cost of a chassis which tend to be dearer as well, and uses non-standard parts. In fact many of these current boards with a separate CPU are going to struggle to keep within the limit of power supply capacity on a lot of Mini-ITX chassis (the Antec I have with my AMD E350 board in it has only 60 watts) and it's possible with the passive cooling and the size of a regular CPU heatsink/fan that things might not fit and it might get too hot inside.

So that is another alternative to upgrading the Pi, which I can find another use for that isn't so demanding as video playback, which obviously gives it a hard workout.

Using a Raspberry Pi as a livestream player [1]

When I wrote the first post of this series I fully expected using my former Windows 10 PC as a home theater PC would work out. That didn't last long and the Windows 10 part was soon moved to another computer so the Mini-ITX system could be reinstalled with Lubuntu for the specific role that it was needed for. That hasn't worked out either, in both cases the older low-spec hardware is the issue, not specifically because it is low-spec but because it is older. The AMD E350, while good for desktop use, is not recent enough to be able to decode modern video codecs fast enough to be able to give good video playback on Youtube and other live streams.

So as the updates to that post attest, I had moved to using the Antec chassis system with Lubuntu, but that has not worked out after about a month of use. The only reasonably cheap solution, therefore, is to move to using a Raspberry Pi for this application. Although my one and only Pi is being used at my desk for a particular application where it gets its internet connection off my phone's mobile data, I can use an old laptop for that particular purpose in the meantime while I use the Pi for the bedside PC application (for night prayer/intercession use), until I can get another Pi.

The model 3 B Pi is just slightly too underspec to keep up with all livestreams. It actually still does work very well with Youtube on 240p or lower, but at higher rates tends to drop out a little. That is OK for now, and far better than the E350. The Pi 4 which has just been released is available with 2 GB of onboard RAM at $85 for the board ($105 with 4 GB of RAM) and is much faster than the 3 B and has many enhancements such as dual mini-HDMI ports, USB C power , etc. To that price you have to add a case and power supply, which can be done in stages as funds permit. There is no real hurry on that as I can get by for now with the 3 B, which is currently powered off a spare Ipad power adapter. I could continue a similar arrangement with the Pi 4 and save on the cost of a power adapter, but it will be a toss up whether to go with 2 GB or 4 GB of RAM, and also which distro to run on it if I want to use Firefox, which is apparently unavailable for Raspbian.

So the Antec chassis will go back to being my Windows 10 PC, which in turn can be moved out of a bulky spare desktop chassis again.

Using a Windows 10 computer as a media player

UPDATE 19-10-7: Due to cost the Win10PC was put into an old obsolete chassis and parked in a corner of the room so it can be used when needed but it will not sit on my desk and will hardly ever be used. This was accomplished using an identical spare G-E350 WIN8 mainboard and the boot disk removed from the Mini-ITX chassis and it works fine. The Mini-ITX chassis was then set up with Lubuntu using the 500 GB HDD that was in it for a data disk for Win10PC.  x11vnc has been installed to enable remote control for maintenance purposes and with Kodi it works a lot better than when it was running Windows 10.

UPDATE 19-10-6: Whilst this computer will do for now I am looking at replacing it when I have the resources with a new Raspberry Pi (the new RPI 4B has a significant performance improvement over the 3B that I already have) or NUC running Linux just because it is getting a bit long in the tooth with performance issues, but in reality most of these issues are related to Windows 10's excessive resource demands on it. The other option being to put the Windows 10 computer into another chassis and release this chassis for the spare board of the same type and run that on Linux so I will consider the options for that.

UPDATE 19-10-3: After the heap finally managed to update itself to Windows 10 release 1903 (a whole drama and story in itself, which has taken months of failing to install the update, and me deciding I just could not be bothered troubleshooting, then finally it managed to install itself successfully last night), Kodi started having playback problems only with videos, every few seconds the audio would drop out momentarily. The solution I found that worked was to go into Settings, Player Settings, Videos, change the rendering method to DXVA and turn off DXVA hardware acceleration.

Back in December 2014 I got an Antec Mini-ITX chassis to use with a Gigabyte GA-E350 WIN8 board that I had purchased. I actually had two of these boards (the other one is stored as a spare). Given it's almost five years I'll elaborate that I originally got these boards, which were very cheap since they were designed for low power compact computers needing a power supply of less than 50 watts and have an integrated AMD E350 CPU. These photos were taken at the time I built the system and are missing from the article that is on the blog and I need to put them back in it sometime.

The bare chassis looking through the grille on one side which is for cooling, through the I/O plate on the back.

 The partly assembled system. The board is installed and screwed in place and the internal cables (mainly front panel USB / switch / LED) are just loose waiting to be plugged into the board. You certainly need the low profile cooler on this board because a full size one would have trouble fitting inside.

 The system assembled and running, with the display showing a setup screen. The extra cables that weren't in the previous picture are for the hard drives.

 On the back of the chassis under a blank panel is the mounting plate for the 2.5" hard disks (there is room for two of them). You can see one is installed here with the power cable hanging loose in the 2nd mounting position. Behind the HDD is the bottom of the motherboard. The mounting plate is detachable because the disks sit on the inside of it and there are insulating pieces supplied to prevent the HDDs from shorting out on the metal mount plate.

Looking inside the complete system installing Windows. The cables have been tied back in place ready for the lid to be put on. The power input cable, which is for 19VDC from an external power supply that is supplied with the system, can be seen upper right. There is a small power supply board inside the chassis that generates the usual voltages (+/-12V +/-5V +3.3V etc) at up to 60 watts for the system with the usual ATX power connector.

Anyway if you followed this blog you'd know that this system has ended up as my one and only Windows computer and now has 10 Home running on it, and until recently was hardly ever used. But now I want to get some use out of it so I've been setting it up as a media player computer for bedside use, which means mostly playing music or playing videos with the screen turned off. The main issue with an older system like this one is the CPU won't have the codecs built in for playing a lot of video which means it can't handle the higher resolution or high bit rate videos well, since video playback on most operating system these days depends on the CPU doing hardware decoding, a key reason why I upgraded a Sandy Bridge system last year because it had trouble playing back WEBM videos. In this case for the use this system is being put to, that isn't a problem, and Youtube videos that stutter can be changed to a lower bit rate in the browser.

So what software do we want to use compared to what we can use in Linux? Kodi is available on Windows and it worked fine this time. I had trouble with it on a previous Windows installation where there was no sound. Windows Media Player has been out of Windows for so long that I have almost forgotten what it was like, and the alternative app built into 10 is nowhere near as good as Kodi. The other main application needed is a sync tool to sync the video and music libraries from another computer. Since I use NFS for my day to day networking stuff in Linux and MS doesn't make their NFS networking stuff available to Home Editions I had to set up a Samba share on the mediapc and network using the built in SMB/CIFS support for Windows. Karen's Replicator is the ideal program for syncing. I used to use this to back up my Windows computers back in the day and it does everything needed to get a full mirror that also replicates deletions on the source.

Artful release date set for 19 October

So the date for the Artful release (17.10) of Xubuntu has been set for 19 October, about eight weeks away. I have been running it on all three of my Linux computers for several months and have noticed only a few minor issues. 

Mainly the issues boiled down to:

• In a number of cases I have had to configure third party repositories to use zesty as the release as few of these seem to have considered that they should be making a version available for artful, even development versions like Qgis.
• Kodi not being available from the official Kodi repositories in a compatible version. Solved by using the version from the Debian repository
• There has been an issue on the mediapc with Kodi constantly freezing after restoring from hibernation.
• VirtualBox did not update to the latest version automatically from the zesty repository, but the version downloaded from the website manually did update. The manual update was necessary because the installed version of virtualbox stopped working after a major package upgrade.

In each case when there is a software freeze or some other challenge I try updating to the latest release. Almost every time I check for new packages there have been hundreds of updates. It is not particularly unusual to have three hundred new packages each month and it can take easily half an hour or more to install them all. However all these updates have gone smoothly.

The mainpc has been a lot more reliable hibernating since I got rid of the Nvidia 4 head card and used the cheap two head card that is supported out of the box by the Nouveau drivers. If I should want to have more than two displays in the future I could put a second two head card alongside the existing one as the Gigabyte H97-D3H mainboard has two PCIe x16 slots installed, although I think the second slot will only do 4x but for a cheap card that may well be fast enough. Alternatively using the onboard graphics would also be an option as Intel graphics is well supported in Xubuntu and the hardware supports three displays out of the box. However apart from map drawing there has been no ongoing call for three displays and the maps project is scaling down a lot at the end of this year so there is probably no real urgency to go to three displays and in fact there is a much simpler solution, now that each PC on the desk has its own keyboard and mouse then simply use, for example, the windows pc's display as a third display of something.

The usage of VirtualBox running Qgis in a Windows 7 VM has worked out very well for completing the major part of map development running an older version of the Qgis development master because of major problems with later versions. The best thing about the Windows versions of Qgis apart from being able to handle more resources such as 250 or more Geojpegs loaded simultaneously is that they don't automatically update like ones in Linux do (if you have specified the repositories in your sources.list file or imported an update list into /etc/apt/sources.list.d) so I don't have to worry about breaking Qgis with an update. I won't be updating that VM with any newer Windows release of Qgis before the end of this year and don't know if I will bother with any of the newer versions on Linux as the later development releases with a lot of challenges and project file corruption issues among other things is not something I can be bothered with wasting time on at present. This VM has been allocated 12 GB of RAM and it is surprising to see how much this drains mainpc's resources, I guess the browsers are sucking up all the RAM in the computer, absolutely typical as they are major resource hogs, even Firefox Developer with e10s.

The bedroom pc is going to be updated with a new motherboard I am being given which is a Asrock Q1900 Mini-ITX. The advantage of this is the use of an Intel BayTrail CPU instead of the AMD E350 in the current incarnation of this computer as the AMD graphics are now deprecated officially by AMD so this computer has with the latest release of Xubuntu been having a lot of problems with graphics stuttering. The Bay Trail in the Asrock board means Intel graphics which are much better supported under Linux. I also have the option with the mini-PCIe slot on board this computer to put in a wireless card which would enable it to have wireless on board, again as long as I stick to an Intel card it will be supported out of the box. It is interesting Asrock have anticipated a few different uses for their series of board and have a Q1900DC model which instead of the ATX 24 pin power connector has a DC jack that can accept 9-19 volts DC from a laptop power adapter. If I was starting from scratch with an enclosure that didn't have its own power supply (the Antec I bought has a separate laptop style adapter and a small internal board to produce the standard voltages) then this board would be well worth taking a look at.