Well, colour me impressed. I just spent the afternoon building out a media client for my shop using a Raspberry Pi. First time I've ever really used one, and I have to say that I'm pretty fucking impressed. I now have a wireless Plex client driving an old TV for me to have as background noise in the shop while I'm building shit. FOCUS: All things Raspberry Pi
In case you were interested, it was a $35 Pi 1 B+, with an $8 wireless usb adapter, running the Kodi client on a 64GB MicroSD card. The hardest part was getting the OS flashed on the SD card (it HAS to be FAT32 to begin with, which is "fun" to do with a 64GB SD card.) All in all it's working like a charm... just takes a fair bit of time for the PLEX info to sync up with the box initially (I have a TON of movies/tv shows/etc to sync over). First time I tried it I blew up an 8GB card, so had to go out and pick up a 64GB one. Next up is figuring out a remote control for it.
If you have and Android phone check out Kore. It is the official remote app from kodi. I'm not sure if Apple has an equivalent app available
Turns out there are a ton of remotes on Amazon... ordered one for $11 and it's due to arrive on Tuesday. We'll see how it goes... but it's a remote with an embedded keyboard and shows Kodi screenshots, so I'm optimistic.
Another thing to check out is if your TV supports CEC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Electronics_Control I have my raspberry Pi hooked up to an LG and I can use the TV remote to control most aspects of Kodi. I believe there was a setting in Kodi that had to be turned on as well as on enabling the feature on the TV
I had intermittent issues with decoding when running Plex on a streaming-only (I.e. not decoding) device. Like, lock-ups when I would try to skip in movies, or occasional black video with only audio. Never happened with MP4 files. The Plex server was running on a pretty powerful i5, too. I like my Chromecast for simplicity but I keep itching to play with a Raspberry Pi.
My dad and I put together a basic weather station running on Raspberry Pi. Pretty fun little project.
Needless to say I have 2 of the v1 B+ Pi's (one is a Plex client, and the other is a dynamic "picture frame" using Google Drive sync). I've just ordered one of the new v3's and am looking forward to playing with it.
Yeah, it's just a shitty old monitor that doesn't support CEC, and doesn't have a remote control... my main TV does and it works well with my latest gen Apple TV. I have the Plex server doing the decoding and it's adjusting the stream to account for wi-fi strength/throughput, and Kodi has a "you're using a Pi" mode that specifically requests easy-to-play versions of the videos for lower-power boxes. Other than the v1 of the Pi choking a bit during the initial sync, it's been running flawlessly for the few hours I was putting it through its paces.
I've been into raspberry Pis for a few years. My main interest is retropie. It's an emulater setup that works pretty well for anything made pre PS1. Some N64 games work but most have issues. It used to be really difficult to work with. But the new versions don't require you to be very technical at all. Just working knowledge of a ftp file transfer will do. The point of this is if you want to play nes, snes, mame or old sega games get one now.
The pi 3 is a huge jump and makes many issues go away simply by having a great processor and 2x the memory.
My main reason for picking a couple of them up was to play around and get familiar with them so we could build out a MAME box for the new office... a really nice, walnut construction, high-end reception area toy for the company.