Last week the Raspberry Pi foundation announced you could purchase MPEG-2 and VC-1 decoders for the Raspberry Pi. The MPEG-2 option costs £2.40 and the VC-1 codec costs £1.20, you buy the options from the Raspberry Pi store and then they mail you the codes.
There's also a 'clock cracker' with a picture of Tux that should help diagnose. Posted in Raspberry PiTagged pal, protocol, raspberry pi, teletext. And simply no comparison with a “normal” DVB-T Mpeg2 encoded stream,.
The codes that the Raspberry Pi foundation email must be added to a file called config.txt which is located on the boot partition of the Pi’s SD card. You open the file and add the lines to the file. You must do this for each image you have built for the Raspberry Pi and the code is linked to the serial number of your Raspberry Pi.
So what do you get when your purchase the MPEG-2 decoder and what does the VC-1 decoder do?
I copied a few files from my Media Center system to an external hard drive (to I could rule out any network issues). I used the latest version of Raspbmc and the recordings were taken from a Windows 7 machine with DVB-T2 card. I also tested WMV (Windows Media Video) files and a un-encrypted DVD file.
I tested the formats one at a time with a combination decoder licences installed, here are my results:
Format | With out decoders | With MPEG-2 | With VC-1 Only |
Windows Recorded TV SD Recording (WTV) | Audio Only | Video and Audio | Audio Only |
Windows Recorded TV HD (WTV) | Audio Only | Video and Audio* | Audio Only |
Windows Media Video (WMV) | Will not play | Will not play | Video and Audio |
DVD** | Audio Only | Video and Audio | Audio Only |
* BBC One HD recordings would load but not play correctly, Channel 4 HD worked fine.
** Un-encrypted DVD
So if you want to use a Raspberry Pi to watch Windows Media Center recordings you will need the MPEG-2 decoder but unless you want to watch WMV files you don’t need the VC-1 option. If you want to watch DVD files all you need is the MPEG-2 decoder.
I will be bringing my Raspberry Pi to our user group in September if you want to have a go with it in person. Over the weekend I recorded a video testing some of the formats which I have embedded.