Hey,
I guarantee, Ive looked for an answer before this post, but tbh I find the new forums a bit non-intuitive :x
Anyways, I got an old Pi (1 rev B I think) laying aroung and Im wondering if its worth to start playing around with OSMC. Or is the pi3 way better so that I just should ditch my old Pi and get a new one?
/Im coming from aTV1 and at the moment the problems with it are getting worse (sluggish video start with OSCM, atm it wont start anything at all instead it would die on me. CB2 was perfect in my eyes, but my database seems to be broken and I just cant get it fixed )
So Im looking for a replacement of the old aTV which should be reliable above anything. Next it should run smooth
The old pi b should work but it takes a patient person. It has half the memory and I believe a lower quality memory so end up with less cache for buffering and slower performance. Also 1 core vs 4 cores is a big difference. I recently slapped retropie on my old be and put atari to snes on there and gave it to some kids. Pi3 is good and overclocked pi2 works pretty much just as good as the pi3.
yes, I recommend the samsung class 10 evo. Fairly cheap cards that I have NEVER had a pi issue with. The new pi 3 requires more power. I’m lucky enough to live down the road from MCM electronics which is a licensed pi dealer and they have cheap power supplies.
And I am wondering if the 20 minutes it takes to install OSMC on it wouldn’t have given you already an answer to your question.
I would say it works well on a Pi1 if you don’t expect wonders but memory is your main issue especially if you want to install other services (MySQL, tvheadend, Apache,…)
Might have given me a insight - if I would have the needed hw here (missing SD card and reader)
Wouldnt have answered the question if the pi3 is a big improvement though since I cant compare it …
I will say that obtaining a Pi3 can be done through Amazon pretty easily but you pay a higher premium.
Element 14 sells it directly with shipping as do a few other vendors.
Where are you located, are you in the states and if so anywhere near a Microcenter?
EDIT:
A Pi 1B+ will run OSMC - I would recommend limiting the display resolution to 720p (you’ll find playback becomes much better and in most cases you won’t see a huge difference if you don’t have a giant TV and the right distance for it). In addition, your video files should be smaller quality and size than 1080p if you can help it, again to improve performance.
The multi-threaded capability plus faster CPU speed on the 2 and 3 is really helpful in this instance, though, so I’d suggest a 3 if you can get it - roughly the same price as a 2 nowadays and really worth it.
On a note, I would also suggest that the Pi1 can serve EXCEPTIONALLY well as a media server. Attach a USB hard drive to it (get one of the USB 2 or USB 3, it won’t matter how fast really, as you’ll only get 100 mbit transfer from the ethernet) and connect directly to wired on your network to improve performance. A 3-4 TB USB HDD runs around $80 to $110 USD right now, and makes EXCELLENT media storage as well as overall data storage. While it won’t be the fastest NAS on the block due to the roughly 11 MByte/100 Mbit speed you’ll be limited to, it IS external storage for every computer and system on your network, and that speed’s more than capable of putting out decent quality movies to any machine in live streaming.
On the Pi2 or Pi3 you set it up as a SMB share. There are a few guides out there on this and several on OSMC themselves, MagPi even produced a good guide on setting both of these up.
If you can, I’d suggest having the NFS as well as SMB capability on both Pi’s, NFS share is a bit better performing so you may be able to squeeze those extra few MB/s out of the Pi1. But keep the SMB share active for the windows clients if you have any - they can’t do NFS for jack.
I’ve got a Pi 1 rev B and a Pi 2. It’s true the Pi2 is faster (more memory/better CPU) but that doesn’t mean I would ditch the old 1. My old Pi just runs OSMC and nothing else (Pi2 has hyperion and some other stuff) and it’s for me as fast as the new Pi2. There’s only 1 thing I cannot stress when using a P (any version, even 3)i: get a good and fast SD-card! Don’t just trust it when it says it’s a Class 10 card. Check some fora and you’ll find there’s real differences. I had a Kingston Class 10 but switched to a Samsung EVO Class 10 and the difference is huge. OSMC uses lots of small reads and writes (thumbnails etc…) and that’s where you will see the difference. IIRC SANDisk are also very good for OSMC but are more expensive than Samsung. Just search a bit on Google.
We currently sell SanDisk which is quite reliable, but a few months ago I was looking at other options on the market. End result: we have now produced our own card. It’s Class 10, but it will outperform pretty much every other card out there. The card is tweaked to provide really good random write and read performance (4K). This is really important, and will make a difference for operations like library scraping and loading add-ons, textures, skins in to memory.
In my build environment, I like to use NFS for building, but it’s still good to keep toolchains locally on the device (we build native), so that we can purge / administer easily and sometimes due to connectivity, we need to build locally. So I need very reliable cards that provide good speeds, more so than users, and as you can imagine they get quite the stress test. I’ve been using these for several months on my main ARM slaves, churning out a fair few builds a day, and haven’t noticed any degradation in speed.
We should finish the first (commercial) batch for Friday.
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