Hi,
I want to use OSMC as a media center on my raspberry pi, but I’m really not satisfied with it’s performance. So I hope to hear your experiences and tips.
I’m running a quite plain installation of OSMC on a raspberry pi B+ with only a handful of addons. For control I use either the Yatse app or a wireless keyboard. The navigation Only sometimes works smoothly. Most of the time it is quite jerky and reacting delayed.
I’m watching the cpu capacity of my raspi, but it does not exceed something like 60 %.
Next, I would like to send music from my Smartphone via BubbleUPNP. If I only send one song, it takes a few seconds to until it starts playing, which would be ok for me. However, the song is played only stuttering. If i send a playlist of say 20 songs, the playback usually doesn’t start at all.
Ok, I could go on like this for a while, but it’s all the same. The question is: am I expecting too much of the little raspberry pi? Would later generations or a entirely different hardware provide a significantly better performance?
If not, how can I detect what is going wrong?
Please share your experiences and estimations with me .
I have a Pi1, Pi2, Pi3 and Vero4k so can give you a respective view.
The Pi1 is a bit sluggish with the current OSMC/Kodi version, while it still can be used it is not fun.
The Pi2/3 is from GUI perspective feels quite fluent and overall are a decent mediacenter for content up to HD (while certain HVEC files might have issues).
The Vero4k is very fluent on the GUI and plays any video file upto UHD with any codec given.
So if you want a future proven fluent mediacenter the Vero4k is surely worth the money. And depending on the accesoirce you are buying together with the PI3 (Remote, SD Card, HDMI,…) the Vero4k is not 4 times as expensive but more like double as expensive and also remember buying the Vero4k support OSMC for the long run.
I got the feeling that people are using OSMC with a rpi 1 or 2, aren’t they? Is there an alternative? Do you think a lightweight skin would make things better (currently I’m using the default OSMC skin), or maybe there is a less demanding alternative to OSMC?
Surely people are using it with the Pi1 and Pi2. First the Pi2 is a totally different beast than the Pi1 (for that reason I have put the Pi2 into the same category as the Pi3 in my summary. But yes also the Pi1 still works fine if you just don’t expect miracles from it.
So if you say " Most of the time it is quite jerky and reacting delayed." What does that mean exactly? Changing a menu taking half a second?
OSMC is already one of the more light skins. You always can try estuary or confluence but I doubt they are more fluent.
Yes, half a setcond for changing menus is normal. But very frequently it gets completely stuck and does not react for more than 10 sec. Even if I am just clicking through the menus.
Could you please explain, how “the Pi2 is a totally different beast than the Pi1”?
I would like to understand what is really limiting the performance of the pi? As already mentioned, neither the cpu nor the RAM seems to be used at its full capacity. Please apologize if this is a stupid question.
What is the cost when you add in what you need to get a Rpi working. You need an SD card, case, power supply, HDMI cable. The Vero 4K includes all those.
Well @actiona already posted the crucial information. Not only is the CPU clocked higher but it actually is a different architecture (arm6 vs arm7).
Well that doesn’t sound typical but still it could be something where a background task blocks the CPU. If you want to dig into that enable debug logging and upload logs after the freeze happens
