Just upgraded to a PI3 + hifiberry Digi+ and it's fantastic

General Discussion
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I have a pretty involved kodi network in my house. Up until recently it consisted of:

  • Intel Core2Quad workstation with 8 gigs of ram and a 128 gig SSD running as a dedicated Sql server. I perform all my library maintenance on this machine.

  • 24 tb Nas housing my media in my library

  • Apple TV w/decoder connected by HDMI to main main 7.1 home theatre in my media room

  • Apple TV w/decoder connected by HDMI to 50" TV in my living room, optical out to an all in one 5.1 home theatre in a box system in my living room.

  • Raspberry Pi A+ 512mb connected to a 32" tv via HDMI and optical out from the tv to another 5.1 home theatre in a box in the bedroom.

  • Raspberry Pi A+ 256mb connected to a 19" monitor and a small set of powered speakers connected by analog. This was my garage system.

  • Intel i5 computer running windows in the wife’s office, kodi runs in a window.

  • Intel i7 computer running Windows in my office area, kodi runs in a window.

Up until Jarvis this worked perfectly. I still don’t know what broke, but the 256mb Apple tvs and Pis just refuse to be stable any more.

Out of frustration and almost two months of losing a pleasant media watching experience I decided to try out a Pi3. I figured I would skip the 2 entirely as I like the idea of the 64 bit support in the future.

The living room system is our “daily watching” place, as our living room and kitchen are all in one big room. It made sense to do this system first. I decided after much digging around that a Pi3 with a hifiberry digi+ would suit my needs best. It was small, easy to hide, and OSMC supports it out of the box. I ordered one 9 days ago and received it today.

Holy. Crap.

This little card is orders of magnitude faster than the Apple TV it replaced, and the optical out worked instantly once I set it up through “MyOsmc”. All of my frustrations from sluggish menu performance, slow video starts, stuttering, poor seeking performance, crashes due to memory issues… All gone. I am absolutely flabbergasted at how much of an improvement it is.

I needed an optical out which is the only reason that I chose this card over a Vero, but if the Vero performs better than this I’ll be strongly considering at least one of those to add to my collection.

I’m so sold on this solution that I’m ordering a Pi3 with an Amp+ to drive a pair of Bose DS16 SE speakers in my back yard/patio (will wirelessly connect to my kodi network as an AirPlay target from inside a waterproof housing). I’m also going to order another Pi3 with Digi+ for the bedroom system.

I moved my server to my garage to act as the kodi station there directly which eliminated the need for that Pi entirely.

One purchase has already got me overhauling everything. Two months of frustration and I’m finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.

Goodbye 256mb platforms. I’m moving up

4 Likes
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Great read and thanks for sharing your experiences!

I also needed SPDIF out so I ended up with a Vero2 … I almost bought similar setup as yours.

Which version of Hifiberry Digi+ did you buy? The standard version or the version with output transformer ? https://www.hifiberry.com/digiplus

Did you need to set an Audio Delay to have your audio in sync? I needed to set a delay of -175ms on my Vero2 (as some others also on RPi).

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No delays set yet, so far I was focusing on trying to reproduce the conditions that were failing with the old boxes and everything was running as intended. I’ll be digging in to my configuration a bit tonight to really run it through its paces.

With my old pi’s audio sync was an issue going hdmi to tv then optical out from TV to home theatre so I stopped doing it that way (never found a delay that worked).

I’m running the non transformer version (standard) as I only need optical, not spdiff

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Well, ran about 5 hours of media through the pi3 last night. Not a single error. No delays needed either. I’m going to figure out how many more boxes I need and order a few more.