pibox is a member of miot, which is a brand I'm using for a variety of solutions I'm working on for the raspberry pi. “miot” stands for “My Internet Of Things”.

I've been working on PiBox now for a couple of years.  The immediate goal is a consumer-oriented device for video playback while not connected to the Internet.  In other words, play movies while camping.  I have longer term goals for it, but that's where the project is aimed currently.

At home I used to use XBMC (now known as Kodi) on a big-metal server sitting behind my big screen TV for media services.  It's primary use was to play the 500+ movies I've ripped to ISO images.  That machine hasn't run in quite some time as it got quite hot behind the TV and I think it basically died.  Instead, we have a Roku hooked up to that TV and we stream hulu, Netflix and amazon.   The problem with the roku (and other streaming boxes and sticks) is that none seems to support playback of locally stored videos.  So I still have a use for xbmc (re: Kodi) type software.

I could use PiBox for this but because the omxplayer doesn't support ISO images I would have to rip all my ISO's into MP4s.  That's doable, but my wife likes to have the dvd menu system and the ability to add and remove subtitles.  So MP4s by themselves are not sufficient for this use case, at least not without external subtitles ripped separately.

So I installed OpenELEC on an sd card and brought it up on a Raspberry Pi Model B+ with a wifi dongle.  Setup was simple enough and I was able to connect to my nfs export video collection quite easily.  They even do an NFS query something akin to an SMB query.  I didn't know you could do that.  Anyway, it automatically found my exports and I was able to configure them without any fuss.  I then did a library update and had all the posters I needed, though some are incorrect.  Those can be fixed later if necessary.  The update found all the ISO images plus the mp4s, since both are on the NFS exports.

I then tried to play a movie ripped as an ISO.   The Pi was not overclocked and loading the initial videos leading to the menu took quite some time.  Eventually the loaded and played, albeit with lots of jumpy behaviour.  I didn't have audio hooked up at the time.  I tried to jump the DVD menu but this never displayed correctly.  I was unable to play the movie.

Next I tried overclocking the Pi.  The lead-in videos didn't play and I was only able to see the text for “Play Movie' from the DVD menu.  I managed to start the movie and it played modestly well but still with too many freezes and jumps.  Due to the nature of the video playback I never tried testing the audio playback.

What this tells me is that the ISO use case is not well supported on the Pi.  At least not the Model B+.  The Model 2 might fair better.  I don't have one yet and won't be getting one for a while due to changing jobs.  It also tells me that the trailer use case – the use case for PiBox – would be much simpler to use if I just used PiBox and ripped everything to MP4s.  However, I will have to add configuration support for using separately ripped subtitle files.  The VideoFE app, which wraps omxplayer, doesn't have this yet though omxplayer apparently supports it.

So my design of PiBox with the specific use case of MP4s seems to be a better solution than Kodi if all you want to do is playback your locally ripped videos on a Raspberry Pi.  That's good to know.  I like Kodi and use it on my desktop.  But it's not necessarily the right app for a device like the Pi given all use cases.  As a side note, I designed the VideoFE to use whatever playback tool you choose, so it could be used on my desktop as well.  I would just swap out omxplayer with xine or mplayer.  I haven't tried that yet, but intend to before too long.