Hey Dlanor, so I see you've stopped using a USB stick with Rasplex now, I literally just set mine up for the first time today as my stuttering issue came back.
Am I better off reverting back to SD only?
The new use of RAM-cache for poster images eliminates nearly all the speed improvements that a USB stick can offer for the GUI interactions. And it never had any effect at all on playback (since playback doesn't involve access to the storage partition).
So your use of USB isn't going to help anything except the initial entry into a large library section (once per session), as that does involve fetching a lot of images from the pre-cache area in the storage partition. But even that improvement will only be noticeable for fairly large media sections. (Meaning hundreds of posters.)
Can anyone recommend an SD card that is working for them please? I was using a Transcend Class 10 and it will no longer boot or register when I insert it into my PC so I think it's dead.
That is of course possible, but it might just be corrupted. Windows usually has trouble 'seeing' a drive if the partition table is corrupted. But you might be able to clean it out and reformat using a partitioning tool. If the disk manager of Windows can't do it then the "Paragon Partition Manager" might still be able to handle it. It has saved some cards of mine from a similar fate.
As for the Transcend brand of cards, it's one of my favourites. I have several of those, which I use both for Raspberry Pi and Banana Pi (a similar small-box computer). But those cards are both Class10 and UHS-1 certified, which makes a big difference.
It's only with Class 10 cards that you can safely use overclocking, and overclocking is one of the things that might eliminate your playback stutters.
Did a fresh install on a Class 6, 4GB Sandisk I had lying around today and still getting stuttering issue so will need to upgrade it.
The SD card should not affect playback, but the Class 6 specs may cause general unreliability and crashing, especially if you use any form of overclocking.
Additionally, I don't know how to SSH or use Linux commands so in the past I've had some trouble because as you know, once you remove the SD card from the Windows machine after that initial install, you can no longer see the config files etc.
Actually there are several ways of modifying the files after initial install.
The simplest way is probably to move the card back to your PC's card reader, and access the FAT32 partition on it again.
The "config.txt" file is read from that partition at every RPi boot, so new changes made to the file will take effect.
I have done this several times to add overclocking to cards that I originally prepared without any overclock settings.
Other ways include not only SSH protocol (for which I use the Windows program "PuTTY.exe"), but also SMB protocol (normal Windows fileshare access). But both these methods require some knowledge about how to configure and access stuff under Linux.
Am I likely to have an issue getting my new USB stick back to FAT32 format having ran the installer on it eariler today?
A simple 'Format' command will not be enough, since that would only affect the first partition (the tiny FAT32 portion).
You need to repartition the drive, and Windows will sometimes be 'stingy' about it. If the built-in disk manager won't do it you may need to turn to the "Paragon Partition Manager" again. (The same tool I recommend for expanding the ext4 partition on USB sticks used with RasPlex.) This can be used to delete all existing partitions and then recreate a new FAT32 partition using the entire drive space.
Thanks for any input guys, been over a year using Rasplex now and quite a journey so far :)
Yes, RasPlex has changed a lot over the last year, getting better all the time :)
Best regards: dlanor
