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evoweiss
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PostPosted: Sun Nov 25, 2012 4:57 pm    Post subject: Wireless HDDs and gentoo Reply with quote

Hi all,

This is not so much a question, but me seeking advice on how to set something up.

I was thinking of buying and setting up a Raspberry Pi to play videos that I have on my computer. My desktop isn't powerful enough to stream quickly, and I am not presently in the market for computer upgrade for various reasons

What I was thinking of doing was purchasing an wifi-enabled 1 or 2 TB drive. I would hook this up to the Raspberry PI and just move videos and the like to that drive from my desktop. Is there some way to set this kind of thing up? Even better, as I have a 1 TB external HDD already, is there a way to hook that drive up to the network without another computer?

Best,

Alex
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NeddySeagoon
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PostPosted: Sun Nov 25, 2012 5:48 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

evoweiss,

What do you call 'stream quickly'?

An mpeg2 stream (raw dvd) is at most, 9.6G for 2 hours or so. That's 1.3MB/sec, or not a lot.
Other formats have better compression, so the data rate is lower.

If you can't stream at that rate, you probably can't post here either :)

First, make it work wired with no extra bits, before you spend money on equipment you don't need.
You can export your videos to the Raspberry Pi over NFS to start with, or even connect a USB HDD to the Pi directly, it will need to be a powered USB HDD.

I have not tried video decoding on the Pi yet but I do run a kernel seeds mirror on a Pi, which has its root filesystem on NFS and I build packages on another Pi which has everything except /boot on a USB HDD. Building is accomplished with cross distcc.

I can confirm that both NFS and USB HDD work with the Pi. Beware the Pi USB ports - they will not provide the 500mA the USB spec demands, so if your want a Pi with WiFi, you need to use a powered USB hub for the WiFi dongle.

Hardware mpeg2 decoding on the Pi needs an extra paid licence, so you will use some other video source.
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NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.
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evoweiss
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PostPosted: Sun Nov 25, 2012 6:15 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hey Neddy,

Thanks kindly for the information. I'll try as you recommend, namely getting the Pi and a powered USB hub and trying to play videos from the external HDD for starters. I'll then brave the wireless waters. It may be a while until I post again, but I will do so.

Best,

Alex

NeddySeagoon wrote:
evoweiss,

What do you call 'stream quickly'?

An mpeg2 stream (raw dvd) is at most, 9.6G for 2 hours or so. That's 1.3MB/sec, or not a lot.
Other formats have better compression, so the data rate is lower.

If you can't stream at that rate, you probably can't post here either :)

First, make it work wired with no extra bits, before you spend money on equipment you don't need.
You can export your videos to the Raspberry Pi over NFS to start with, or even connect a USB HDD to the Pi directly, it will need to be a powered USB HDD.

I have not tried video decoding on the Pi yet but I do run a kernel seeds mirror on a Pi, which has its root filesystem on NFS and I build packages on another Pi which has everything except /boot on a USB HDD. Building is accomplished with cross distcc.

I can confirm that both NFS and USB HDD work with the Pi. Beware the Pi USB ports - they will not provide the 500mA the USB spec demands, so if your want a Pi with WiFi, you need to use a powered USB hub for the WiFi dongle.

Hardware mpeg2 decoding on the Pi needs an extra paid licence, so you will use some other video source.
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evoweiss
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PostPosted: Mon Nov 26, 2012 6:28 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Dear NeddySeagoon,

Am I right in thinking you're running the Pi like a diskless node?

Best,

Alex

NeddySeagoon wrote:
evoweiss,

What do you call 'stream quickly'?

An mpeg2 stream (raw dvd) is at most, 9.6G for 2 hours or so. That's 1.3MB/sec, or not a lot.
Other formats have better compression, so the data rate is lower.

If you can't stream at that rate, you probably can't post here either :)

First, make it work wired with no extra bits, before you spend money on equipment you don't need.
You can export your videos to the Raspberry Pi over NFS to start with, or even connect a USB HDD to the Pi directly, it will need to be a powered USB HDD.

I have not tried video decoding on the Pi yet but I do run a kernel seeds mirror on a Pi, which has its root filesystem on NFS and I build packages on another Pi which has everything except /boot on a USB HDD. Building is accomplished with cross distcc.

I can confirm that both NFS and USB HDD work with the Pi. Beware the Pi USB ports - they will not provide the 500mA the USB spec demands, so if your want a Pi with WiFi, you need to use a powered USB hub for the WiFi dongle.

Hardware mpeg2 decoding on the Pi needs an extra paid licence, so you will use some other video source.
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NeddySeagoon
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PostPosted: Mon Nov 26, 2012 6:54 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

evoweiss,

Except for /boot, yes. The Pi can only boot from a vfat filesystem on the SD card.
The partition must also have the bootable flag set.

I actually have swap and /home on the SD card too because it seemed silly to only use a few Mb of a 32G SD card.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.
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