bluray direct play at 24hz on raspberry pi3

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1

I’ve been on a mission to find a plex client that can achieve the following:

  1. direct play of bluray rips
  2. drive TV at movie frame rate (24 or 23.976hz)
  3. wireless connection

I’ve finally gotten this to work thanks to lots of good information in these forums. this post is just a summary. Item (1) is to reduce load on my server and achieve the best possible quality. Item (2) is to reduce judder. Good TVs will detect 3:2 pulldown when driving them at 60hz and correct it, but many (including mine), cant reliably detect 3:2 pulldown (tested on rtings.com). Item (3) is because it’s difficult for me to run ethernet to my tv location.

Rasplex on the pi3 must be the cheapest device that can do all three of these things. I think the Nvidia shield could also work. Many other devices can not sustain the bluray bitrates, and even fewer devices will switch the TV to 24hz for 24p source.

This was mostly a technical challenge. Yes, I agree a bluray rip transcoded to 10mpbs and played at 60p on a roku is pretty good.

Steps needed:

  • Install 5ghz USB ac wifi. Bluray’s seem to average around 20mpbs, but I’ve read they can go as high as 54mbps. For me, with my router 1 room away, the built in pi3 2.4ghz radio could sustain ~40mbps to my server (as measured with the iperf app), but this was borderline and would result in occasional studdering/freezing during playback. With a 5ghz 802.11ac connection, I can sustain ~110 mbps which has resulted in flawless playback.

  • rasplex settings: make sure the “match refresh rate to source” is set. this can be checked by running “tvsevice -s” during playback.

2

what I dont understand its from what format container are you going to reproduce it and with what codec

Some blue-ray codecs might need an additional codec license and some might not be even supported. You also have to keep an eye on the color depth

3

I do this but with two changes;

  1. Wired. I could not get a reliable WiFi set-up.
  2. I bought the VC-1 (and MPEG2) codec licenses. The VC-1 makes direct playback possible, otherwise the RPi3 can only decode a BluRay rip at about 3 FPS. The MPEG2 codec lowers the power requirement and the heat output. Total cost for both about £4.

Been running like this for a long time.

Edit: For those reading this but who may not be aware of RPi license keys, see http://www.raspberrypi.com/license-keys/

4

Yes, wired its a better setup as you can experience random errors because of the lack of traffic shaping in the RPI.

Its not uncommon to saturate the wifi AP or the rpi itself with the high demand of the precache and its a pain to pinpoint the culprit

Its not that hard to put some lan cables around the house and it will greatly improve performance

5

Yes, I should have mentioned I also have the VC-1 and MPEG2 codecs, and use the MKV container for BluRay rips. It was never clear to me if these codecs are needed ( I thought the MPEG2 was for dvd’s?) but so far so good - about a dozen blurays I have have been able to use direct play.

6

@mt5555 said:
It was never clear to me if these codecs are needed ( I thought the MPEG2 was for dvd’s?) but so far so good - about a dozen blurays I have have been able to use direct play.

Yes, they are worth it. I have about 600 films, a mix of about 75% HD-DVD/BluRay rips (all my own disks, which are now in the attic) and the rest DVDs. Then a similar volume of TV series, documentaries and foreign films, all a mix.

Without the MPEG2 codec I was getting the thunderbolt icon for low power and the thermometer icon for overheat when playing DVD rips. The VC-1 is an absolute requirement for about 1/2 the HD rips.

7

I assume everyone uses MakeMKV, but if not I would suggest having a look at that :slight_smile: