Volumio + XBMC. An audiophile media-center

Hello world!

After a quick presetation in the relevant forum section, here I am to discuss the use of Volumio as an efficient media-center.

I bought my Raspi primarily to build an audiophile digital source to feed my DAC/pre (see hifi gear in signature). I haven’t recieved my Hifiberry Digi so I won’t comment on the audio quality just yet :stuck_out_tongue: Currently, audio runs out of HDMI to the TV which feeds a poor TOSLINK signal to the DAC/pré

Volumio beta 1.1 works geat out of the box (adding NAS shares, choosing output…). Here are a few quirks I encountered:

  • The MPD parser is stuck somewhere along the scan. Restarting MPD or the scanner removes from the library all the already scanned media of the share. I don’t have a solution yet for this. A bad TAG ??
  • writing the image to a 8GB SD card resulted in a 2GB partition that I had to enlarge it with Gparted to make full use of it.

Seeing only 7-8% of CPU usage and no clicks & pops, I wondered if I could add XBMC to it.

Why not start with Raspbian or Raspbmc ? Well, I thought the work to get mpd working with the right configuration and emoving the crift and unnecessary things from Raspbian/bmc would be more difficult than just adding what I needed to Volumio.

I mostly followed this blog post, with a few modifications:

  • Leaving the GPU with only 16MB or RAM resulted in a Segfault for XBMC, of course --> set to 128 in config.txt (I will try to reduce to 64MB if it makes a difference).
  • I set XBMC to start on boot without a window manager (most ressource efficient way, so it seems). getting the mouse/keyboard to work involved the addition of an UDEV rule that is stlightly different from the one in the blog post. Here’s the line in the udev rules file:
    KERNEL==“mouse*|mice|event*”, MODE=“0777”
  • I set the niceness of the XBMC to 10 as it shouldn’t bother music playing.
  • I bought the licenses from Raspberry Pi store

Results:

  • at idle with the XBMC home screen displayed on the TV, xbmc process eats up to 60% of CPU. That’s a lot. I’ll see if I can get that down a little.
  • h264 1080p decoding is pretty fluid and it’s nice to see that mpd doesn’t “steal” the audio out when it is idle. XBMC takes control of the audio device and releases it a couple of seconds after pressing “STOP”. So mpd and XBMC work well with each other. I hope it will stay the same when using Hifiberry Digi.

Next to do:

  • test the power supply of the Pi with the back USB port of my Atoll ST200 streamer. Should be a cleaner power supply.
  • get/solder/test the Digi !
  • reduce XBMC CPU usage at idle

I would like to know if there is a major inconvenient in what I have done and/or if you have suggestions to improve the current setup :slight_smile:

Cheers!

Olivier

Good luck my friend! Why not a dual boot solution? Volumio features lots of system wide improvements that are difficult to implement in such a different environment… Then, isn’t XBMC based on Yocto? If yes, forget to install anything (I’m doing a project with XBMC on yocto these days and I am really near suicide :smiley: )

Sounds awesome!

try this and see if it helps.

sudo mpd --create-db

See what errors it generates, could be a bad tag or a dodgy encode

I’ve known XBMC for years and I don’t know what yocto is :slight_smile: So I can’t comment on this. For me XBMC is the former Xbox media center it has always been, and the linux was based on mplayer for years, but aside from that, I never dug into how it works and where it comes from.

Why not a dual boot solution: because I already tried that and I’m simply too lasy to reboot every time I need to hear good music. I’ve tried on the HTPC where I have a lasy ubuntu box with pulseaudio, skype, xbmc… and a pure Debian with only asla and MPD. I just don’t use the Debian.
Since I didn’t modify any Volumio system file or sound configuration file, I shouldn’t have “harmed” sound quality in any way. and CPU usage is low enough for my taste. It’s still Volumio. I just added a few (dozens of) packages.

Solved already but thanks :slight_smile:

What was it out of interest?

It is not user friendly.
It does make sense to use your kernel/base system and put XBMC on top of it.

But I am still curious to see the list of modifications you applied to the original system, I will check the repo when ready.

I set "enabled=no in the mpd conf file.
Maybe that’s “avoiding the problem” instead of confronting it. I’ll try again with the command line as you suggested.

Hi Aquarius,

I tried to install xbmc over my Volumio by following your tuto’, but I get some errors… is it possible to get some help from you ?

Thank you :wink:

Aquarius,

I just installed XBMC “on top” of Volumio with your instructions without much of a hitch, but I was wondering if you were able to get the XBMC and Volumio Airplay functions to coexist? I am hoping it is possible so that I can stream video via XBMC, and audio via the Volumio/USB audio out without having to duel boot, etc. As of now, can get both “audio” airplay receivers to show up, but then they seem to both disappear often as well…no luck on XBMC video streaming as of yet.

Thanks in advance.

-Craig

So I’m using Volumio and rPlay on top which plays Airplay Video for me and does Mirroring too. I got both icons to coexist as well but it doesn’t work perfectly and rPlay disappears sometimes. I guess having both icons at the same time at all is a step forward. rPlay is still in beta yet though and quite buggy.

Sorry for the time I take to answer. Difficult times.

  • To those who asked: yes video playing works fine. audio through HDMI works fine.
    I haven’t yet tried to make xbmc send sound through the Hifiberry Digi but that’s one thing I may end up not doing so as not mess up Volumio’s primary use: a hifi source.
  • I haven’t tried anything related to streaming (shairport and the like…) I will though, and try to report back.

Installed beta 1.3 yesterday from scratch and spent 2 evenings trying to install XBMC the same way I did with 1.1. I had some wierd depandancy issues trying to install from this HowTo:
michael.gorven.za.net/raspberrypi/xbmc

Python version installed on Volumio seemed too HIGH for XBMC. and I had to downgrade.
Worked like a charm afterwards.

Cheers all!

Hi Aquarius!

Thanks for your work. I was looking for a similar solution, I got tired swapping SD cards. Could you describe briefly how did you the Python downgrade?.. btw I have also the Hifiberry digital, is the system working with the Hifiberry?

Thanks a lot!!

I get this error:

[code]pi@volumio:~$ sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mene.list
pi@volumio:~$ sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-key 5243CDED
Executing: gpg --ignore-time-conflict --no-options --no-default-keyring --secret-keyring /tmp/tmp.awws01k0M3 --trustdb-name /etc/apt//trustdb.gpg --keyring /etc/apt/trusted.gpg --primary-keyring /etc/apt/trusted.gpg --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-key 5243CDED
gpg: requesting key 5243CDED from hkp server keyserver.ubuntu.com
gpg: key 5243CDED: public key “Michael Gorven (Package Signing Key) michael@gorven.za.net” imported
gpg: Total number processed: 1
gpg: imported: 1
pi@volumio:~$ sudo apt-get update
Get:1 http://mirrordirector.raspbian.org wheezy Release.gpg [490 B]
Get:2 http://mirrordirector.raspbian.org wheezy Release [14.4 kB]
Get:3 http://mirrordirector.raspbian.org wheezy/main Sources [6071 kB]
Get:4 http://archive.mene.za.net wheezy Release.gpg [198 B]
Get:5 http://archive.mene.za.net wheezy Release [4487 B]
Get:6 http://archive.mene.za.net wheezy/contrib armhf Packages [8786 B]
Ign http://archive.mene.za.net wheezy/contrib Translation-en
Get:7 http://mirrordirector.raspbian.org wheezy/main armhf Packages [6887 kB]
Ign http://mirrordirector.raspbian.org wheezy/main Translation-en
Fetched 13.0 MB in 1min 17s (167 kB/s)
Reading package lists… Done
pi@volumio:~$ sudo apt-get install xbmc
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
[b]Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
xbmc : Depends: xbmc-bin (>= 2:13.1-2) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: xbmc-bin (< 2:13.1-2.1~) but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
[/b][/code]

Any help?

I solved this issue removing python2.7

sudo apt-get remove python2.7-minimal

but after getting xbmc installed I got:

/usr/lib/xbmc/xbmc.bin: error while loading shared libraries: libEGL.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Maybe I broke something. This workaround with symlinks did not work for me:

raspberrypi.org/forums/viewt … p?p=156384

(last post in this page)

I’m too busy to go on trying now, but I’ll return to the matter soon.

btw: is there any no-berryboot dual boot option? for me would be perfect!

Have you tried this?
raspbian.org/RaspbianXBMC

I tried to compile/install XBMC using the guide here:
raspbian.org/RaspbianXBMC
however when I tried to install some base packages I get the following error:

[code]pi@volumio:~$ sudo apt-get install build-essential autoconf ccache gawk gperf mesa-utils zip unzip
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
autoconf is already the newest version.
unzip is already the newest version.
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
build-essential : Depends: gcc (>= 4:4.4.3) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: g++ (>= 4:4.4.3) but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
[/code]

How to solve this error? I have no experience with dpkg-based systems.
I already tried

 sudo apt-get clean 

Hi Lag-na,

like you i have be struggling for a while since Volumio 1.3 to get packages added to the Debian.
Following Michelangelo’s advice solved my issue : http://volumio.org/forum/wicd-curses-dependency-problem-t1336.html#p5664

Have you installed XBMC using apt-get or have you compiled it?
Could you please guide me a little? thanks

I got this working!!

Installed the 1.5 release for the Pi and then xbmc. It’s working fine!

The only staff not working is the CEC control, but I use my iPad as remote for xbmc.
I’m veeeeery happy cause I love Volumio (billion thanks Michelangelo for your work) but I don’t want to be exchanging sd when I need xbmc. When I don’t need xbmc for a long time I run “sudo service xbmc stop” and Volumio works alone… : :slight_smile: