[Trilug-ontopic] Raspberry Pi and omxplayer

[Tom Callaway]

Hi!

A few thoughts immediately:

1) USB flash ("thumb") drives tend to be crap. They go bad, often
silently, sometimes in erratic ways. Try copying your files over to the
SD card and seeing if the behavior goes away, if so, the issue is on the
other side of the USB port.

2) The Raspberry Pi has low-power USB ports, and they can be
underpowered if you do not have clean power coming into the Pi. Make
sure you have a good 1A 5V power supply feeding the Pi, I highly
recommend: http://www.adafruit.com/products/501

(I've seen this issue when people try to power their Pi off the USB port
from a television, often that power is not enough for proper operation.)

3) Make sure you're not running too much off the USB. The Pi really gets
cranky when you have too many devices plugged directly into its USB
ports, where "too many" often equals 1, especially if that 1 is a
high-powered USB device (like 95% of the devices out there). If you need
to plug things into the USB ports, I strongly advise using an externally
powered USB hub (aka, it gets power from a wall outlet, not from the USB
bus).

4) USB 3.0 devices will not solve your issue, since the Pi only has 2.0
capable ports. They'll work, but they'll run at 2.0 speeds, so if that
is truly the issue here, you'll have spent more money for no good reason.

5) Depending on your video codecs/file-formats, you might not be
decoding in hardware (over the built-in GPU). Given how underpowered the
Pi is, you really want to be doing that. Specifically, if your videos
are in MPEG-2 or VC-1 format, you need to buy and use a license key for
your RPi:

http://www.raspberrypi.org/new-video-features/
http://www.raspberrypi.com/license-keys/

Hope that helps,

~tom

==
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