On Sunday, January 13, 2013, Mohan Sundaram <[email protected]> wrote: > I got mine from the US, thanks to my mother travelling back. I got it > in 20 days in the US. Got a ModelB, wireless keyboard/mouse and a USB > wifi adapter. > > My intent was to convert my HDTV into a Smart TV.
This is really a good usage of the device, rather than buying a smart tv which comes with pre-built environment and too costly, converting a LED / LCD TV which are HDMI compatible, now I regret for buying a smart tv. My nephew all the > donkey's work of downloading the distributions, appropriate package > setc and did the set up. We loaded XBMC/ Rasbian+XBMC /OpenElec to try > how these work. Raspbian + XBMC gave some dependency errors and > rebooted twice. XBMC is good but OpenELEC seems a lot smoother and > responsive. XBMC also rebooted once as I was using it but OpenELEC was > stable. > > The wifi dongle RTL8183cu based ran out of the box thanks to the > drivers included in all these distros. The board was powered from the > USB port of the TV and display using HDMI. We tried playing a HD movie > from the sdcard and it played flawlessly. We then tried streaming from > (a) Samba share (b) NFS share. Both resulted in buffering. Increasing > the buffer from 5MB to 150MB delayed the buffering but did not > eliminate it. Wired connections plays without buffering. > > Problem area is the wifi. Research showed that the USB port current > draw for external devices is capped at 140mA by polyfuses. Many dongle > drop rates if not enough power is available. > > Next steps: > a) Try a mains driven USB power to the R-Pi instead of a 500mA USB > power and see if the wifi dongle operates at higher speeds. > b) Use a powered USB hub for the dongle and see of speeds improve. > > P.S: One big surprise I had was that the XBMC interface was operable > using my TV's remote thanks to HDMI's bidirectional control lines. I > also downloaded an Android app for XBMC control and it worked like a > charm. > > > -- Mohan Sundaram > _______________________________________________ > ILUGC Mailing List: > http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc > -- Regards, Prasanna Venkadesh ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- PuduvaiLUG Mailing List: http://puduvailug.wordpress.com/mailing-list-guidelines/ FOSS Jobs all over India: http://fossjobs.in _______________________________________________ ILUGC Mailing List: http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
