Raspbian - Debian optimized for the Raspberry Pi hardware

[Lazybones]

http://www.raspbian.org/

For those that are playing with the Pie this might be useful.

[Tom]

Yeah, I saw that yesterday, it looks really cool.

I'll be playing with it on one of my Pi's soonish. I also hope the raspbmc picks up the underlying distro, or at the very least, the kernel, and the idea of the full armv7 softfloat (its actually hw float... odd name...) support. Apparently raspian is supposedly able to play back hd movies all by itself now on raspbian, and something tells me it doesn't use the GPU video decode features.

[Mr. Analog]

Yeah, it must do a software decode, I seem to recall to keep the price down they didn't include any HD decoding guts on the Pi.

I heard that there also seems to be a distro problem in that many people who've ordered early still haven't gotten theirs...

[Tom]

Yeah, it must do a software decode, I seem to recall to keep the price down they didn't include any HD decoding guts on the Pi.

It actually does have HW decode for h264, VC-1, and h263 (xvid).

I heard that there also seems to be a distro problem in that many people who've ordered early still haven't gotten theirs...

A lot of the places that let your order are back-ordered quite badly. They only made like a few thousand at a time. And they'd all immediately sell out. They ramped up the production now though. 5000/week or some such.

[Lazybones]

Yeah, it must do a software decode, I seem to recall to keep the price down they didn't include any HD decoding guts on the Pi.

It can decode h.264 codecs in hardware but is not licensed for other still common codecs such as mpeg2.

[Tom]

Yeah, it must do a software decode, I seem to recall to keep the price down they didn't include any HD decoding guts on the Pi.

It can decode h.264 codecs in hardware but is not licensed for other still common codecs such as mpeg2.

I thought they finally got a license for mpeg2. But mpeg2 really isn't all that common with video files. And the pi doesn't really do DVDs unless you get a usb dvd drive. And DVDs is really the only place mpeg2 is used much at all afaik. Everywhere else uses xvid, h.264, and VC-1 these days, with possibly some VP-6 thrown in for good measure (and old ogms using vp-3).