I tried something new last week: I read that the $35 Raspberry Pi can output hi-rez multichannel via HDMI, so I ordered one. With power supply and case, the total cost was just barely under $50, so it wasn't too horrific a gamble. I installed OpenELEC (a stripped down Linux that boots directly into Kodi/XMBC) and...no.
Feeding it "The Endless River" resulted in the receiver saying it was indeed getting 5.1 at 24/96. Although I didn't do anything that would make me absolutely sure, I believe the signals were going to the correct speakers. That's the good news. The bad news is that the sound was littered with dropouts and completely unlistenable. It looks like the CPU, pegged at 100%, just can't keep up with the FLAC decoding.
I re-encoded a couple files from FLAC 8 down to FLAC 5 and the results were better, but still nowhere near good enough. If I have time, I may test with FLAC 0 just out of curiosity, but that's a real waste of storage space and possibly network bandwidth as well.
Locating the files on a network drive or on the internal MicroSD card made no difference.
Typically, I had been considering buying one of those little boxes for months but didn't finally pull the trigger until Wednesday. Because reality is little more than a plot to annoy me, I woke up this morning to the news that an updated Pi is coming with twice the RAM and a quad core processor...for the same $35 price! Maybe that will work.
You can find all kinds of claims out there from people swearing that their Pi can play 1080p video with multichannel audio, but I can find no evidence on my end that such a thing is even remotely possible. I couldn't even get it to play crappy downloaded porn--oops, I mean religious music videos--without trouble.
Feeding it "The Endless River" resulted in the receiver saying it was indeed getting 5.1 at 24/96. Although I didn't do anything that would make me absolutely sure, I believe the signals were going to the correct speakers. That's the good news. The bad news is that the sound was littered with dropouts and completely unlistenable. It looks like the CPU, pegged at 100%, just can't keep up with the FLAC decoding.
I re-encoded a couple files from FLAC 8 down to FLAC 5 and the results were better, but still nowhere near good enough. If I have time, I may test with FLAC 0 just out of curiosity, but that's a real waste of storage space and possibly network bandwidth as well.
Locating the files on a network drive or on the internal MicroSD card made no difference.
Typically, I had been considering buying one of those little boxes for months but didn't finally pull the trigger until Wednesday. Because reality is little more than a plot to annoy me, I woke up this morning to the news that an updated Pi is coming with twice the RAM and a quad core processor...for the same $35 price! Maybe that will work.
You can find all kinds of claims out there from people swearing that their Pi can play 1080p video with multichannel audio, but I can find no evidence on my end that such a thing is even remotely possible. I couldn't even get it to play crappy downloaded porn--oops, I mean religious music videos--without trouble.
but since I've got the same Foobar skin: 
