Due to ongoing re-configurations at home there was a need/opportunity to upgrade the media center serving the living room. The Intel NUC which has served as media center for many years has shifted base to the cellar and a Raspberry Pi 5 has taken its place. It also means that once again I have at least one RPI running of each existing version đ
Nowadays there are many Raspberry Pi to choose from, but I have learnt to appreciate the RPIs with their still excellent support when it comes to accessories and general support, both from hardware- and software providers but also the communities.
When I decided to once more buy an RPI, close to my 20th, I wanted to give it a performance boost and settles for an M.2 HAT and a 1 TB M.2 SSD. After putting the fiddly cabel in place correctly it just works and shows up, and the raspi-config tool even let’s you set it as the preferred boot device. There is an upside to not running “bleeding edge”, the RPI5 was released September 2024âŠ
When running KODI I did observe a lot of DMA errors in the kodi log and problems with playback. That was with the default kodi in the current stable Debian, Bookworm, but installing Kodi 21, which is also available in the standard repositories, solves it. And even if the RPI5 officially only supports PCIE 2.0, it runs fine with PCIE 3.0, which the M.2 SSD also support. Writing to disk at half a gigabyte per second is far from SD card performance and it boots quickly.
Initially I thought I will stick to the AC wifi but since it sometimes picked the 2.4 GHz wifi with same name (still running Google Wifi since the AC performance has been sufficient and reliably covering the estate), and my re-connection script sometimes struggled, I went with an Ethernet cable from the wifi puck instead. That works fine without a single re-buffering incident also when playing and un-compressed Blueray at 25 mpbs over the network.
So far so good, I might get back with further comments if I learn anything of interest.