Pez's Raspberry Pi 4 Adventures!

[figmentPez]

The short version: I'm looking for a device that can stream Netflix and Amazon Prime (possibly Hulu or others) at 1080p.

Longer version: For a couple of years now my mom has used space in my apartment for sewing quilts. I recently moved to a new apartment, and in the new layout her quilting space now has a good view of the TV, and she'd like to watch while sewing. Previously I've used a 15' HDMI cable to feed the TV from my computer, and that still works (my Blu-ray player's Netflix app is too old), but I want to be able to keep using my computer while she's watching.

I assume the simplest answer is going to likely be either a Roku, Amazon or Google stick of some sort, but I want to check to make sure I'm not missing something. Also, I want to consider the possibility that this might be an excuse for me to tinker around with a Raspberry Pi. The cost increase of a Pi is acceptable, since it would give me a project to work on, but it still needs to be reliable and somewhat easy for my mom to use.

Any opinions?

 

[Dei]

If she knows how to open things on her phone, Chromecast is pretty easy to use and won't require her to navigate new menus or anything. Do you prefer ease of use or something that is as multi-purpose as possible?

 

[Tinwhistler]

The short version: I'm looking for a device that can stream Netflix and Amazon Prime (possibly Hulu or others) at 1080p.

Longer version: For a couple of years now my mom has used space in my apartment for sewing quilts. I recently moved to a new apartment, and in the new layout her quilting space now has a good view of the TV, and she'd like to watch while sewing. Previously I've used a 15' HDMI cable to feed the TV from my computer, and that still works (my Blu-ray player's Netflix app is too old), but I want to be able to keep using my computer while she's watching.

I assume the simplest answer is going to likely be either a Roku, Amazon or Google stick of some sort, but I want to check to make sure I'm not missing something. Also, I want to consider the possibility that this might be an excuse for me to tinker around with a Raspberry Pi. The cost increase of a Pi is acceptable, since it would give me a project to work on, but it still needs to be reliable and somewhat easy for my mom to use.

Any opinions?

Roku stick does this, and it's pretty simple to set up. I can't speak to other sticks.

I've got Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime, Youtube, DC Universe, and a few other channels set up on mine. And it does 1080p.

 

[figmentPez]

If she knows how to open things on her phone, Chromecast is pretty easy to use and won't require her to navigate new menus or anything. Do you prefer ease of use or something that is as multi-purpose as possible?

I'm assuming that any of the dedicated solutions is going to be easy enough for her to use. It doesn't have to be stupid easy to use, in fact I'm struggling to think of any likely interface problems that couldn't be figured out, assuming that everything can I can get everything pre-configured. I'm more worried about reliability of the Pi. i.e how likely it is that compatibility is going to break, and how long will it take for things to start working again? Do any of the streaming services seem to be actively trying to break Linux/Pi/DIY streaming support?

As for the dedicated solutions, are there any specific models to avoid?

And it does 1080p.

To clarify, I mentioned that to discourage anyone from recommending a more expensive model just because it handles 4K. I'm too used to nerds insisting that everyone needs to buy the best specs possible (like this recent Engadget article on "budget" streaming devices.)

 

[Squidleybits]

We got the kids smart TVs for Christmas that have all that built in with no need for attachments. Just use the remote to select which streaming service you want to watch. The remote claims to have Alexa but we haven’t tried it. The TVs were not expensive (don’t tell the kids!).

 

[Denbrought]

I'm very happy with the Fire TV Stick I have. It cost $35 in November 2018, costs $35 now, would definitely re-buy if mine broke. I don't have Amazon Prime at the moment, but it does pretty much every streaming service I've cared to use (notably Netflix, Youtube), plus Plex. The remote is dead simple, and Alexa is clever enough (plus the remote is push-to-talk instead of "always listening" due to battery capacity).

 

[Shakey]

I hate the fire tv interface, switched all of mine to Roku. It’s personal preference though. I like controlling it through a remote, and not have to use my phone if I don’t want to, so not a fan of chrome stick.
You can get cheaper ones for $20 if you only need 1080.
You can do it with a pi if you want to do some playing, but it probably won’t be as reliable. Kodi I think is the big one. Not sure on how many streaming apps besides YouTube and Netflix it supports though.

 

[Tinwhistler]

We got the kids smart TVs for Christmas that have all that built in with no need for attachments. Just use the remote to select which streaming service you want to watch. The remote claims to have Alexa but we haven’t tried it. The TVs were not expensive (don’t tell the kids!).

We've recently had 2 cheap tv's go out, and I replaced them with relative cheap roku tv's. I got the stick for traveling purposes.

 

[PatrThom]

You can get any number of boxes to hook to your TV to act as a mirror for whatever you're playing on your phone. They range from expensive things like the Apple TV and Fire Cube all the way down to Roku and Chromecast. Some of them don't need a phone, but many of them are going to expect you to have one, if only for the setup process. The important thing is going to be to know what ecosystem you're already using. If your house is already full of BrandX phones and stuff, you're going to want to get whatever TV adapter thingie BrandX makes, otherwise you're just asking for a headache.

When comparing, remember that many (most?) require a separate power source, so you're either going to have to get a USB cord to leech power from the TV to power the thing, or else have another open outlet nearby to plug in whatever power adapter it needs.

If the TV already has Roku or something built in, it might be easier to just figure out how to get that working. As for breaking compatibility later, I would treat that as an eventuality. Between the push to move to 4K and the fight for vendor lock-in, as the guy on the Titanic said, "Eventual failure is a mathematical certainty."

--Patrick

 

[Dave]

I will always pimp Roku. I love my Rokus.

 

[GasBandit]

I also love my Rokus. Chromecast is nice enough if you're tech savvy enough to use it, but roku is just SO darn convenient. And it does Netflix, Amazon, and a jillion other things.

And a Roku Express is $20 at Sam's, which comes with its own HDMI cable, USB (power) cable and adapter, remote, and batteries for the remote.

 

[PatrThom]

It's a shame the Shield line didn't turn out cheaper/better/more reliable. They coulda been a contender, or at least driven prices down a little more.

--Patrick

 

[figmentPez]

As for breaking compatibility later, I would treat that as an eventuality. Between the push to move to 4K and the fight for vendor lock-in, as the guy on the Titanic said, "Eventual failure is a mathematical certainty."

Yeah, but there's a difference between the cheap model eventually not supporting the latest version (with no update ever), and the open source version not working for a week because the DRM got updated and someone "accidentally" broke compatibility with all open source stuff. I don't know how often this happens to a Raspberry Pi, but I know Disney+ didn't work at launch on Linux, for no good reason. And I know that, on Windows even, Amazon Prime and Netflix have gone through periods where they only fully support certain browsers. Like, I had to start using Edge to watch Netflix a while back beause Firefox was only permitted to get 720p streams. (They even patched out a workaround that allowed forcing 1080p on Firefox.)

 

[DarkAudit]

I will always pimp Roku. I love my Rokus.

If only I had funds to keep the Hulu account going, I'd be set. This TCL TV is a damn good value.

 

[PatrThom]

Disney+ didn't work at launch on Linux...
Amazon Prime and Netflix have gone through periods where they only fully support certain browsers...

EFF Resigns From W3C After DRM In HTML Is Approved In Secret Vote

And from another article:

With Google and Microsoft shipping W3C EME and content providers moving over their content from plugins to W3C EME Firefox users are at risk of not being able to access DRM restricted content[. Therefore] We have come to the point where Mozilla not implementing the W3C EME specification means that Firefox users [would] have to switch to other browsers to watch content restricted by DRM.

And Disney+ didn't work on Linux because they (Disney) didn't "trust" Linux's implementation of EME, so it was actually working as designed, just not in the viewer's favor. There are also other articles about how supporters may have promoted EME as an open standard that anyone can join, but then go on to show that the amount of development required and the regulatory burden basically mean that only companies big enough to have sufficient resources (Google, Amazon, etc) are going to actually be able to do it, and then even if you build a fully-functional EME you still have the battle to convince browser manufacturers to support it in their code and studios to support it in their distribution... i.e., it's the VHS v. Beta or HD-DVD v. Blu-ray format wars all over again.

--Patrick

 

[PatrThom]

Plex announces free streaming live TV, no dedi hardware required.

free Live TV for everyone, in all 220+ countries that Plex serves. With over 80+ channels (plus even more coming soon) across all your favorite genres. And this is in addition to the 14,000 (and counting) free movies, documentaries, and TV shows you can find on Plex on-demand

youtube version

--Patrick

 

[GasBandit]

I took a look at their offerings, and it could only generously be called a "mixed bag." But hey, free is free. And I still love using Plex for all the media in my own personal library.

 

[figmentPez]

I talked to my mom about options, and she said that she thought I needed a project to work on more than she needed a reliable streaming box, so I ordered all the parts for a Raspberry Pi 4 4GB based box. Still waiting on the power supply, but all the other stuff is here:

I already used one of the 32GB SD cards to up the storage on my phone. I'll use my old 16GB card to set up the streaming box for my mom, and then use the other new 32GB card as a way to tinker around with RetroPi and/or other stuff.

I chose the Argon Neo case because it should allow me to go fanless. The Rii X8 seems like it will be a good way to control a media streaming box.

I'll probably continue to update after the power supply arrives, which might be Saturday.

 

[figmentPez]

Update: Holy crap this is so much more difficult than I expected it to be. I didn't expect it to be easy, but this is a freaking pain in the ass. I'm beginning to think it might be beyond my patience and abilities at this time.

I get that there's not a lot of point to building your own streaming box when pre-built sticks are so cheap, but it's still stupid that it would be easier to pirate the content I want than it is to get this Pi set up for streaming from a service that's paid for.

 

[PatrThom]

it's still stupid that it would be easier to pirate the content I want than it is to get this Pi set up for streaming from a service that's paid for.

...this is the argument that's been made for years, but has it ever changed anything? Noooo...

--Patrick

 

[Bones]

...this is the argument that's been made for years, but has it ever changed anything? Noooo...

--Patrick

cough 4K UHD Blu-ray Drives on computers cough cough

 

[figmentPez]

Whoops, originally posted this to the wrong thread:

Raspberry Pi OS Gets Official Widevine Support

Well, I know what I'm doing today.

--

Recently I had a minor mold problem in my AC system, just dirty coils so it's now fixed, but I checked into a hotel for a couple of nights and used my Raspberry Pi to entertain myself.

The short version of my conclusions:
- The 4GB version of the Raspberry Pi 4 is more than enough if you're just going to use it to playback video or do light web browsing. Even with Vivaldi web browser open playing video from CWTV, and Chromium open browsing Twitter and Halforums, I still never went over about 1.7GB of RAM usage. I don't know who would need the 8GB version, and the 2GB version would be absolutely fine for just using VLC.
- 1080p h.265 video playback is absolutely fantastic. It looks great, and doesn't come anywhere near using the power of a Pi4. Most of the time the processor stays at a throttled clock speed, and
- YouTube playback sucks, even with a recent patch improving it, and 720p60 drops frames constantly.
- Even with jumping through hoops to install an Android version of WideVine to the Vivaldi browser, I couldn't get Netflix to actually play video.
- I could get CW's site working, so I did watch some Black Lightning and Lois & Superman... which didn't really go well. Maybe if I had overclocked my Pi, but at the stock 1.5Ghz the video stuttered very few seconds. (That said, it was a nice stress test for my case. Even without a fan the processor only got up to 76C, below the 80C that the Pi starts to thermally throttle at. Playing back video in VLC the processor stayed below 60C.)
- I played a bit of VVVVVV streaming over the internet from my desktop at home to the Pi at the hotel, and it worked surprisingly well. It actually went about as well as within my own apartment, so the bottleneck may still be my WiFi at home. (I need to get my cable modem moved to a different spot so my desktop can be wired.) Which is to say that it did not work great, with stutters every minute or so, but the latency wasn't terrible and the future of streaming games over the internet looks promising.

I'll see what official WideVine support can do for things, and make another post later.

EDIT: Forgot about my experience with the little keyboard I got. It was surprisingly capable for browsing the web. I wouldn't want to type up a long forum post on it, but it worked just fine for entering URLs, searching, and navigation. If my Pi never gets heavy usage, I may hook this up to my desktop. My Steam Controller is pretty good at controlling my PC, and is better at controlling a mouse cursor, but this Rii X8 is better at text entry.

 

[figmentPez]

Whoops, originally posted this to the wrong thread:

Raspberry Pi OS Gets Official Widevine Support

Well, I know what I'm doing today.

It works!

Netflix, Disney Plus, and Amazon Prime all play well enough. There's some stuttering, I don't think Prime even attempted to play HD video, and I'm not sure if any went to 1080p, so it's still a much better option to just use a dedicated media player device, but it is now possible to play all these on a Raspberry Pi.

 

[figmentPez]

Changed the thread title to reflect the ongoing nature of this thread: I've been playing around more seeing what my RPi is capable of.

Installing RetroArch on Raspberry Pi OS isn't very hard, but installing cores is done very differently from Windows versions. Instead of installing cores from within RetroArch, you install them from the same Add Programs menus you would any other Linux program. This worked fine for SNES and GBA emulators, but I could not figure out how to get an N64 core to install.

Eventually I gave up and decided to install a RetroPie image to my SD card. Which I found immensely frustrating. I understand why RetroPie really focuses on having it's interface completely navigable with a controller, but I don't know why they go so far as to lock out keyboard inputs. Also, it's a pain the ass to figure out how to pair a Bluetooth controller with a default RetroPie image. I eventually got things to work, and learned that the Raspberry Pi 4 can emulate N64 games (at least Diddy Kong Racing runs the first race just fine), but that was just not going to work for me since I want to be able to do more with my RPi than just emulate games.

Which led me to Twister OS. The Raspberry Pi 4 image from Twister OS comes with a lot of stuff pre-installed, including both RetroPie and the recent WideVine DRM. So that clicks two big check boxes for me right off the bat. Plus I can connect my Bluetooth controller while I'm in a full GUI environment, and RetroPie sees it just fine once I start that up.

Interestingly, Twister OS also comes with AM2R pre-installed, and while the game runs, it doesn't recognize controllers correctly. There's a newer patch for AM2R that fixes this, but I couldn't figure out how to apply it to the version that Twister OS is running, and the patched version I managed to install doesn't run smoothly. I can just use a program to assign keyboard controls so I can play the pre-installed version, but I probably won't end up playing it on my Pi anyway.

SkiFree also has a link in Twister OS's games menu, and it runs just fine. Good for a couple of minutes of nostalgia.

Prominently located on the Desktop are shortcuts for Lutris and Steam, and but I'm not sure how useful they are. I started today with Lutris, and had less than impressive results. The Curse of Monkey Island wouldn't install at all. I think because SCUMMVM doesn't have an ARM64 version. Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri installed, and the intro movie even played, but after that I just had a black screen. Not sure what I'll try next, though I'm not expecting much at this point.

 

[figmentPez]

Haven't had a lot of energy to spare on experimenting with gaming on my Pi4, but I have been using it for streaming a fair bit. I can only assume that there's been some work on optimizing code because playback is definitely better than it used to be. The biggest surprise to me is that there seems to be a big difference between the different services, but it's hard to tell for certain with no objective measures of performance.

- Disney+ seems to run smoother and more consistently at HD resolutions, The Owl House definitely seems to be playing back at 1080p with very little stutter or tearing. Disney+ also crashes more than the other services, though.
- Netflix runs okay, and there seems to be less frame loss and tearing than there used to be, but it's still not flawless, and I'm not sure if it's 720p or 1080p (or something in between).
- Amazon Prime, last I checked, still stubbornly refuses to refuses to run at HD resolutions at all, though I think that's because they're being picky about DRM (On PC, as far as I know, they only support HD on the Edge browser right now, they dropped Firefox a few months ago.)

Overclocking didn't seem to help playback performance, though it did improve multi-tasking to an extent. Which brings me to the performance of the Argon Neo case. At stock speeds playing back video it works great. I've rarely seen it go above 70C and most of the time it hovers just below 65. If I run a stress test program, then it climbs above 80, starts to thermal throttle, and eventually hits the 85C limit of the Pi4. At the highest overclock I felt comfortable with, 1.9Ghz (up from the stock of 1.5Ghz), with a overvoltage to 1.45v (up from 1.35v), temperatures generally stayed below 80 with regular use, and hovered around 75 for video playback, but almost immediately pushed the thermal throttling limits when stress tested.

So, the Argon Neo is not really suited to overclocking the Pi4, as I expected. However, since I didn't see any video playback improvement, I'm back at stock speeds and quite happy. I like that it's a silent, fanless case that looks pretty sharp.

 

[PatrThom]

- The 4GB version of the Raspberry Pi 4 is more than enough if you're just going to use it to playback video or do light web browsing. I don't know who would need the 8GB version

Well as of Feb 2nd, you can now officially 64-bit your Pi. One caveat, though: Widevine support still requires the 32-bit version of Chromium, but it seems pretty simple to switch back and forth.

--Patrick

 

[figmentPez]

Well as of Feb 2nd, you can now officially 64-bit your Pi. One caveat, though: Widevine support still requires the 32-bit version of Chromium, but it seems pretty simple to switch back and forth.

Huzzah! That means that development on Twister OS can continue!

One of the biggest annoyances of trying to play with Box86 and Box64 (a translation layer for running x86-64 code on ARM) on Raspberry Pi is that Steam is mainly a 64-bit program these days. You can technically install games with just the 32-bit compatible portions of Steam, but to look at store pages, or even uninstall a game, you have to have 64-bit support. Twister OS (which comes with Box86/64 pre-installed) is based on Rasbian, and they've been waiting on the 64-bit version to continue development, since they don't have the resources to develop for both 32-bit and 64-bit.