I must be doing something wrong, what it is I don't know. I have two RPis both are 512 and I have had no issues using them for xbmc running on openelec. I am now using plex server running from windows 7 and it works great. I watch content on my mobile devices, macbook etc. with no issues.
My RPi is being powered by this: this: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00GC35SF6/ref=oh_details_o07_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
The specifications look fine though that depends on whether you power any other stuff from the same hub.
For just the RPi it should definitely have enough power.
Even so, you never know for sure if a product may have some individual flaw, making it sub-spec.
It's worth trying with another PSU, just to see if it makes any difference.
My own RPi PSU is a 2A unit intended as a charger for Android phones.
Any such charger with standard micro-USB connector should suffice for testing.
I am running RasPlex from this:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003VNKNEQ/ref=oh_details_o08_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
Well, it is a Class 10 card, which is always a good sign.
But a speed 'boast' of just 10 MB/s is a bad sign.
Good Class 10 cards often have read speeds of 30 MB/s (typical for 'SanDisk Ultra SDHC' models)
It should still work, but just not as fast as the better cards.
My sd cards were created using GetRasplex for mac. Running 0.4.0-rc3
That's a major difference between us, as I flash my SD cards using "Win32 Disk Imager" under Windows 7.
I have no experience with Mac software, for better or worse. But I do know that my stuff works fine.
And since you said you have a Win7 system (for the server), it's another variation you can try.
My RPi is connected via ethernet cable while the server is connected over wifi.
That's a good choice for the RPi, but a HORRIBLE choice for any server...
It means that all server traffic, both incoming and outgoing, has to pass a WiFi bottleneck.
I do NOT think that this is responsible for your RPi issues, but it is a handicap for PMS.
I decided to use one of my RPis to run RasPlex on my main tv and have had zero luck getting it to work. I have tried two seperate SD cards both the model mentioned above (Transcend 16GB class 10 SDHC) with no overclocking of the pi. I have also tested on both RPis with the same exact issues.
It's highly unlikely that two different RPi units would have some defect in common.
So it's far more likely that the problem lies in the SDcard choice or in their flashed content.
Another possibility is of course that there's something wrong with the PSU, though I find that less likely.
In your place I'd definitely try various different alternatives.
1: Try flashing the SD cards by different software, such as the one I use with Win7 (assuming you have a card reader/writer you can connect to that PC).
2: Try using another PSU (such as an Android phone charger)
3: Try getting an SD card of a different brand. 'SanDisk Ultra' is one good model and 'SanDisk Extreme' is even better. And of course they should be Class 10. (Some very old cards used the 'Extreme' term without being Class 10.)
And of course you can mix-and-match those variations in trying to find something that works for you.
Video won't play, from the overview page of an episode or movie if I click play via play button at the top left I get a "loading" indicator at the bottom right. Sometimes the text of the loading indicator is unreadable and displayed as blocks. After waiting for anywhere from 2 seconds to 30 the screen goes black for a few seconds and comes back to the movie overview page, the loading indicator is gone, and I can now navigate across the page as RasPlex has clearly aborted the task of trying to play the content. No matter how many times I attempt to play any movie or show RasPlex will not play it. Also, my library is made up almost exclusively of 720p content.
Refusal to play videos can be due to CODEC usage in the video files, especially in "Direct Play" mode.
You can test changing the transfer quality from "Direct Play" to "20 Mbps", which will force all videos to be transcoded by the PMS server into a CODEC format that RasPlex can handle.
Another factor involved in playback of some videos is whether or not you bought the VC1 and MPEG2 licenses from the Raspberry Pi store site, and installed the license codes into the "config.txt" file in the FAT32 partition of the flashed SD card. This is not needed for all videos, but affects some of them.
As for 720p, it's a common mistake for people to refer only to the resolution of a video in judging the 'difficulty' of a player to handle it. It is in fact the bitrate and the CODEC choice that are the most important factors. A high bitrate means more data to process and a complex CODEC increases the CPU work needed per amount of data. But given consistent CODEC use it is the bitrate alone that is the determining factor. Normally 720p and 1080p videos have a higher bitrate than NTSC or PAL videos (480i and 576i respectively, though often used as 480p and 576p), but there is no fixed relationship between resolution and bitrate. For example, I've had both 720p and 1080p videos with just 1000 kbps bitrate though they normally have much higher bitrates.
In any case, the RPi should be able to handle most 720p material, though the RC3 release will definitely need overclocking to reach a bitrate as high as 20 Mbps. The next release (currently under development) will be able to handle that without overclocking, but for the RC3 release a non-overclocked RPi will probably have a bitrate limit somewhere between 10 and 15 Mbps (varies with video encoding).
UPDATE - Enabled verbose logging and after doing this playing any content leads to the audio track being played only.
The only effect the verbose logging should have on functionality is caused by the inevitable extra delays of writing to the log files. And when this affects playback results it means that something else is critically wrong.
I can pause/play the audio track and the screen goes grey with the text “File” at the top with a black square on the left hand side of the screen and a time indicator on the right hand side of the screen.
Text displayed as blocks, on many of the content description pages the Title will be clear, the year, the star rating and the rating but the actual description of the title will be represented as blocks and unreadable.
All these errors must be regarded as 'generic corruption', though it's hard to say if it's a fixed corruption of the flashed card or dynamic corruption arising at runtime.
On the main RasPlex page I have multiple instances of the menu items.
- Channels
- Search
- Movies
- TV Shows
- Channels
- Search
- Movies
- TV Shows
- Channels
- Search
That's not a bug but the standard functionality of recent PHT versions.
The main menu is circular with all rows completely filled, regardless of the number of library sections.
So it's perfectly normal, assuming that "TV Shows" and "Movies" are your only PMS sections.
But if you have more library sections in PMS then those should also have been displayed.
If you start a PHT client without any server connection you're likely to see only multiple rows each holding the "Search" command.
Best regards: dlanor
