I really wish they would stop making newer, faster, more expensive Pi's and just focus on making the existing Pi's cheaper and more available. Out of the dozen or so RPi's I have, not a single one is even connected to a monitor. I don't need dual 4k HDMI ports. I'd love a widely available and in-stock $20 Pi. It's like they've forgotten what the RPi is all about.
Their mass production of the Pi keyboard should clue you into at least one direction that they believe "the Pi is all about"; education, and increasing access to modern computing hardware. Enhancing the performance envelope and connecting to a monitor do, to me, seem like worthy steps toward that end.
Everyone uses general purpose computers differently. I feel your statement "they've forgotten what the RPi is all about" isn't just ignorant; its hurtful. Maybe their direction isn't parallel with what you want out of the products they make, but you should at least have the empathy to recognize that you aren't the main character in this play.
How are two niche ports requiring adapters more accessible than one full-size HDMI port? Are two ports on such constrained hardware really worth it? If my adapter cable breaks (which already happened) I have to order a new one and can't use the device while sitting on a pile of unused but unsupported HDMI cables. Meanwhile iirc it took until after the launch of the Pi 4 to get USB boot support without first flashing and booting a microSD card, another piece of hardware not known for its longevity.
The RPi project is amazing and I'm glad it exists, but some decisions are just weird considering their goals. Though to be fair the RPi 4 & 5 improved the situation significantly.
The weird niche port for video is the #1 reason I stopped using raspberry pi. I have one adapter, somewhere, but I'll be damned if I can find it in less than an hour. It's at the bottom of some bag or drawer of infrequently used adapters
Amen. Micro-HDMI is trash and should NEVER be used, because it will break promptly... especially on a dinky device that moves and shifts a lot.
If a full-sized HDMI port is somehow too big (which it isn't on the regular-sized Pi, and definitely not on the 400), they should just use USB-C ports with DisplayPort capability. I'd rather use a DP-to-HDMI adapter (which is cheap and effective) than a shitty micro-HDMI port.
Personally, I found the mini HDMI ports themselves a downgrade. One is forever looking for adapters. However, having two displays is nice!
It boils down to whether someone is using the device like a computer.
The Pi 400 is a nice, respectable computer and I use one for development. Two displays makes sense and is high value.
Now you can absolutely use the device.
I have an epaper project in development. I have the epaper setup and attached to a Pi 3. That makes sense and it works well. Code output goes there and I have it all in one place.
I use it in two basic ways:
One is headless, using VNC to access dev tools and code located right on the Pi. I keep various wi-fi setups handy and can copy a new one onto the SD card if needed. Usually, I am powering the Pi with my laptop in that scenario.
The other is via plugged in displays with keyboard and mouse.
I do both of those with Pi 3 and 4 devices.
The Pi-400 needs the display adapter and though I have not lost or broken one yet, it seems to me simply attaching an adapter permanently to the computer would make a lot of sense.
This thread makes me want to 3d print a different case so that I can incorporate the adapters properly and just expose HDMI slots like we see on the earlier devices.
Finally, just a tip:
I will often use my laptop as a display for the Pi with one of those HDMI capture devices. Power the Pi with the laptop and bring up a display to work with.
For a lot of reasons, my primary laptop runs Windows 10. It has a lot going on. Sometimes a setup on the pi is easy. When that is true, I just leave things on the Pi.
I agree if they are running it strictly for Linux needs however they may be using it for gpio and not be aware there are gpio USB boards out there that basically do the same thing.
The two HDMI ports are worth it for me.
I have a project with Raspberry PI 400 in multiseat kiosk mode.
It has two monitors, and an extra keyboard and mouse.
The microHmdi->HDMI cables you can get for 2 dollars each.
It paid for itself in saved electricity bills in about a month (it replaced older computers and I set it up just when electricity went through the roof here in Europe).
On the other hand I did not need wifi or bluetooth. But wireless, and the extra HDMI probably does not add much to the price. I think Raspberry made reasonable choices regarding ports, etc.
Personally, I found the mini HDMI ports themselves a downgrade. One is forever looking for adapters. However, having two displays is nice!
It boils down to whether someone is using the device like a computer.
The Pi 400 is a nice, respectable computer and I use one for development. Two displays makes sense and is high value.
Now you can absolutely use the device.
I have an epaper project in development. I have the epaper setup and attached to a Pi 3. That makes sense and it works well. Code output goes there and I have it all in one place.
I use it in two basic ways:
One is headless, using VNC to access dev tools and code located right on the Pi. I keep various wi-fi setups handy and can copy a new one onto the SD card if needed. Usually, I am powering the Pi with my laptop in that scenario.
The other is via plugged in displays with keyboard and mouse.
I do both of those with Pi 3 and 4 devices.
The Pi-400 needs the display adapter and though I have not lost or broken one yet, it seems to me simply attaching an adapter permanently to the computer would make a lot of sense.
This thread makes me want to 3d print a different case so that I can incorporate the adapters properly and just expose HDMI slots like we see on the earlier devices.
Famously the devices have been difficult to acquire because RPi was putting all their manufacturing output into fulfilling commercial market needs (1,2,3). Filling a market need -- well-specced hardware with long support horizons -- is perfectly fine, but Upton et al. have made it very clear that this is the priority and pretending otherwise is weird. Mass producing generic USB keyboards in corporate livery does not meaningfully communicate corporate ethics here.
Meanwhile, most of the competition focuses on beating the Pi on specs, availability, or price -- and none of them seem to have noticed that long support life as being the differentiator which leads to business adoption of the Pi hardware. So I suspect the status quo will persist for the foreseeable future.
Fortunately we don't need belief, since the foundation has years of volume-based sales data on market segments, e.g. for the last two years they have prioritized industrial business users over education, during supply chain shortages.
Is there a published market segment breakdown for each generation of RPi?
Their existing contracts and focus should clue you more into their desired direction than an accessory that they can produce for consumers that is tangentially related to raspberry pis.
The pi foundations focus(be it intentional or just out of a desire to stay open) has been to have prototypes created with raspberry pis that go into production without replacing the raspberry Pi so that device manufacturers are locked into large long-term contracts.
The inability for consumers to find devices available and the odd io choices(IoT video devices like kiosks would benefit from the double ports rather than a single full size HDMI) are IMO the intention of the pi foundation. Their focus is on generating contracts and fulfilling them, consumer devices are secondary.
That's to say they've "forgotten what the pi is about" insofar as they've made choices to grow the business/contract side of the pi foundation more than the education and consumer availability
It's odd then that a
single alternative hasn't risen to prominence to serve their original hobbyist market. There are millions of clones out there of course but any with a trusted brand name and support behind them?
People are both complaining about cost and then complaining that the RPi foundation subsidized the cost of the RPis in order to prevent a viable competitor from emerging.
Beaglebone Blacks have existed and been in stock through the entire RPi fiasco. They are almost completely documented unlike the RPis. The boards have full schematics unlike the RPis. You can buy the main SoC unlike the RPis. The boards have lots more IO and some really nice real-time units. You can get the documentation from TI without an NDA. And the BBB even has eMMC so that it isn't dependent upon horrifically crappy uSD cards. And it runs straight up Debian instead of some weird build. I can go on and on.
RPi has kicked the end users in the teeth over and over and over and people still won't change. People at my hackerspace are willing to spend a bunch of money on RPi to do Octoprint rather than buying a full blown x86 computer for half the total cost.
What the hell do the Beaglebone people have to do to get people to pay attention?
Some modernization would be nice. I like the am335x, and have a product that's been made with it for the past decade - but the am335x is a 32-bit single core processor (with some additions) from 2011, and that's getting a bit long in the tooth.
The Beaglebone people put out new ones, but the volumes were so dismal that they simply weren't worth it.
One engineering problem is that the power envelope is kind of tight. While the RPi simply will not work with 5V@500mA, the BBB does. If you bump the frequency, your power supply needs shoot up and you start needing heat sinks.
It really feels like the Beaglebone Black got the engineering aspects correct. Shame that even hackers are suceptible to marketing.
At this point, being able to use the Beaglbone Black is practically a superpower for me as an engineer. I can buy it. My end customers can buy it. It's real Linux so my end customer can bang on it as required. It's documented, so I can generate the embedded drivers I need and document them.
I suspect that with the industrial etherenet built in, the BeaglePlay is about to take on some of that character.
The issue I’ve had with the BBB is that they always seemed to be a premium cost item. Why am I paying more for something that gives me less compute than a most of the RPi boards. I have one and when I got it it cost me something over $150 AUD, I don’t remember the price exactly but I remember how ripped off I felt, at the time the premium RPi 3 was under $100 AUD
I’d the BBB cost me ~$50 AUD I’d be much more keen on them… for all the well outlined reasons. It it just seems to always cost more than I’m prepared to pay for that hardware.
Interesting points about the BeagleBone; I will check it out.
But this is not credible: "People at my hackerspace are willing to spend a bunch of money on RPi to do Octoprint rather than buying a full blown x86 computer for half the total cost."
I run Octoprint on a 4GB Pi 4. Total cost was probably $75. What kinds of setup are you talking about?
Thanks. Needless to say, that site doesn't exactly have glowing reviews. But to be fair, some of the reviews have absurd complaints about refurb computers, like "came with outdated USB drivers." Wow, do ya think?
The prices are dirt-cheap though. How much stuff have you bought from them?
I've bought a handful of random things, but I tend to go there in person so I don't know what their online purchasing pathways or guarantee handling look like.
But, I mean, the computers are what they say they are. They don't lie as far as I can tell. So, if I go look up what I'm buying, I can see what kind of problems I'm in for.
I don't know about you, but if one of those clone manufacturers made it as simple to install Linux on their machine and have it not be an utter pain in the ass, that would go a long way toward me wanting to trust them.
The problem with the clones, and with clones in general, is that they're never quite 100% compatible. There's always some sharp edge there to cut yourself on. Fix that, and I'll definitely try a non-Raspberry Pi SoC.
The thing you are looking for can be achieved by buying something on the DietPi hardware compatibility list. https://dietpi.com/ I personally have had good luck with NanoPi boards from that list.
The strong point about Pi in my opinion is the software being simple and solid. It just works and any general software you can imagine has been compiled and installs without a ton of effort compared to general Debian or Ubuntu Linux which a lot of the clones use.
Otherwise at this point and prices if you're looking for a low power Linux computer I'd urge anyone over to the big three 1L families like the M7x Lenovo has or HP Elitedesk used machines since they are sub 60w and run circles around basically any single board pc
The biggest problem all the Pi-like devices seem to suffer from is poor software and driver support. The only exception seems to be the ones Intel made.
While I admit that I am a bit envious of the large 4k monitors that my coworkers use, I have managed to make it through life without buying anything larger than a 1440p monitor.
What exactly is the educational advantage (for the demographic that the raspberry pi is supposed to be educating) of the inclusion of 2x 4k ports and does that advantage override the opportunity cost of including the ports?
In other words '1080p ought to be enough for anybody learning how computers work from an SBC.
Raspberry Pi is many things today. The foundation is indeed focused on education, but the company behind it has a much broader focus and sells many (most?) of their devices to commercial customers, where 2x4k outputs might be beneficial, e.g. in digital signage applications.
Honestly, I'm just spitballing here, but it's not like the Raspberry foundation is making its own silicon. They're using what exists. It's probably a simple case of the chipset they chose supporting it, so might as well include it.
They are making their own silicon (see the RP1 at [1]) and obviously have very significant input as to what Broadcom puts into the main SoC, a chip that is primarily now made for RPi needs.
Rp1 doesn’t deal with video, and having two displays is very reasonable for all kinds of things, including display kiosks, points of sale, etc
Even for a robot. They don’t need to be 4k, it I guess that’s just normal these days
I could be wrong, but iirc the HDMI they use and full size HDMI are pin compatible. It's likely they just chose the smaller connector so they can break both out and have a smaller board footprint(as opposed to having a larger board or only providing a connector for one HDMI port)
You can get $60 android tablets brand new on Amazon that don't need a monitor, keyboard and mouse and can use the vast amount of education apps in the play store.
IMO arch or similar is going to do more towards teaching Linux than raspian will. Just install that on a cheap laptop/phone and play around with different apps/configs.
For hardware learning pis arent even that great, an stm32, Arduino , or esp32 is a fraction of the cost(so you don't have to worry about burning the io pins out as much) and the toolchain is basically the same(simpler I'd argue even)
I got a pretty decent chromebook on eBay for 70 euros.
With pretty good display, keyboard, touchpad, touchscreen, 8Gb of RAM and a battery. Runs linux great. Apparently chromebooks dominate education market nowadays, very inexpensive and arguably more useful than a Raspberry pi.
They seem to be in stock at the link he gave you. Amazon has numerous vendors with them in stock (I've had good luck buying from Seeed Studio, but not for rpis, YMMV). I bought 3 of them in the middle of covid when there were almost no rpi 3 or 4 SBCs for consumers anywhere on the planet and if you did find on they were 1 per customer. I think I got them from AdaFruit, who have 78 in stock right now. They were and are anything but unavailable.
Oddly, rpilocator doesn't seem to track them, so if that's your definition of "available"...surprise?
Not sure why you would need dual monitor outputs for education use. I seem to remember at the time of release them talking about how it would actually be useful in telephone call centres.
If they want to increase access to computing hardware, their 'industrial customers first, everyone else can pick over whatever odds and end are left over' sales policy is a really strange way of showing it.
Call centers are dominated by thin clients typically. you can replace them with a pi but after you get software, an SD card, a case, a power supply...the pricing is moot and you don't have vendor support.
Parent should know that the hurtfulness of having a different opinion about the best use of a computer cannot be overstated. Imagine if my great grandfather who survived the holocaust read this comment--it would kill him even worse than hitler tried to.
Having grown up in a world where 8 bit computers with 4-16k ram (and no storage) cost the equivalent of $1000, inflation adjusted, this seems like an almost insane complaint. Hardware is so cheap now compared to software which is still very expensive to produce. A person could spend less than a $100 on a computer and make that money back very quickly doing various digital tasks on fiverr.
>make that money back very quickly doing various digital tasks on fiverr.
>an almost insane complaint
That's not the complaint. Not everything is a "I can make x money back" preposition. The complaint is "A $10 item is costing me $25." It's costing me 2.5x the price it should be. Maybe you should see it from that POV.
You can also keep going on about kids starving right this instant while I complain about 2.5x price difference, it doesn't change a thing. a $10 pi zero 2 w still costs $25, if not more given it's almost never in stock and runs out so quickly.
>Having grown up in a world where 8 bit computers with 4-16k ram (and no storage) cost the equivalent of $1000
That doesn't mean much though, does it? I'm not comparing today's costs to back when you grew up. Nor am I saying today's costs costs are worse than when you grew up. If I was, you'd be right. I am not. I am just complaining about the price I have to pay due to scalping/availability vs price something is advertised at usually.
----
That being said, I understand why shipping exists, but $5 overcharge for sake of it plus $7 to ship something this tiny is a bit iffy. They literally just pack it in a soft wrap and throw it in an envelope.
I think GP's point was that it's incredibly cheap at $25 or at $10, enough so that for hobby uses it shouldn't really matter unless you are the type of person who just can't get past "I'm getting ripped off $10".
They are basically right, although I guess you should add "in much of the world".
>hobby uses it shouldn't really matter unless you are the type of person who just can't get past "I'm getting ripped off $10".
I mean, for one or two devices, sure, whatever (as was my thought process when I bought them). But then I was like, "What if I add a pi zero to this, and this, and this!" and a $15 difference quickly becomes 'expensive.'
A little offtop for everyone who uses comparisons that "old good days" computers/whatever were more expensive so new generation don't have moral ground to complain. Please don't forget about overall context. In that old day you could afford to buy house and don't spend the most of the income for renting. So it's incorrect to simply compare prices for one specific niche, overall context for expenses should be counted in.
I've been trying to get two Zero W 2s for almost two years now without getting ripped off by somebody on the second hand market. They are still nearly impossible to find for the advertised price. :(
While that certainly has been true for the majority of the last two years - rpi's in pretty much all skus have been back in stock for a few months now - to the point that even digikey has many of the skus in bulk stock
Oh, thanks! I've been watching that religiously and while you are correct the other Pi's have been available for a couple months now, the 2Ws have been absent. I haven't checked in a couple weeks now, I'm happy to see they are finally in stock!
Edit: it's a bit premature. Only Chicago Distributors have them in stock at the moment and they are limiting the orders to 1, which is frustrating because I only need 2.
Let's all keep reporting them for price gouging until they get put out of business. Things that could be put to use should not be sitting in a warehouse.
Prices should better be sub-additive, since otherwise market arbitrage opportunities appear (in this case: to get more than 10: buy 10, and find some friends who also buy 10).
If such an irrational pricing appears, it is a sign of market failure; in this case: if the demand is higher than the demand, prices have to increase until for the given pricing level supply=demand. This is how markets self-calibrate.
I wish they took performance more seriously. I migrated a bunch of my stuff off of a Pi 4 to an Intel N100 NUC because the Pi 4 just didn't cut it. I have a bunch of other use cases as well that have struggled with the Pi 4s and competing RK3588 based systems look compelling.
Point is, your use case doesn't match my use case. I hope they continue to make things more performant AND cost effective.
I never understand why people compare the Pi with NUCs. The latter is an order of magnitude more expansive (new, it’s hard to consider used stuff for serious work), has no GPIO built in, consumes way more power…
If you use the Pi as a server it's not an order of magnitude cheaper than a cheap NUC. An N100 "NUC" like a Beelink S12 costs $150 including 16GB of RAM and 256GB NVMe storage! They are really ridiculously cheap. And really low powered.
If you want to use a pi as a server you won't get away with a slow microSD that kills itself every year, you'll need to add a real SSD (USB or now finally PCIe with the 5), decent cooling and power and a case. You will be at that $150 easily and you won't even have 16GB RAM.
I used to mess with little pi servers all over the place too yes. But this was in the days that PCs were power hogs. There's better options now.
> If you use the Pi as a server it's not an order of magnitude cheaper than a cheap NUC
I use my $15 RPi Zero as a git server[1], and it is literally an order of a magnitude cheaper at current prices. I bought the one I have for $5 (it was a promo, but still. That's how cheap Raspberry Pi's can get).
> If you want to use a pi as a server you won't get away with a slow microSD that kills itself every year, you'll need to add a real SSD
You'll need a good power supply if your Pi is destroying your SD cards. I lost a few before I wised up, and it's been years aince I replaced the SD card
1. Also hosts wireguard, has a bunch of webcrawlers and coordinates secondary backups between NAS and the cloud. It may not host docker containers, but the Pi is solidly in the "server" category for me, while consuming less than 1 Watt.
> If you want to use a pi as a server you won't get away with a slow microSD that kills itself every year
That's not true at all. Pick one rated for the workload, eg A2 ("application" rating, optimized for random io) which can be had for < 15usd and you're not gonna run into issues.
Some people want to make a DIY equivalent of a Synology NAS - something to make backups to, and maybe some other light serving tasks. They don't need the GPIO, and they're not attentive enough to their power bill to appreciate the difference between a device drawing $3 a month and a device drawing $0.30 per month. They know many of Synology's products use Arm CPUs.
Later they find themselves saying hmm, it sure would be nice to have real SATA ports. Maybe a shared power supply for the drives and the CPU. It'd be nice to have enough IO and CPU to be able to saturate a gigabit link with encryption turned on. Oh, and a nice case with an active cooling solution built in.
Suddenly, a retired compact PC starts to look like strong competition.
the NUC is a bad example. Plenty of used mini-PCs in secondary markets that can be had for sub-$100-150 price range with 7th-8th gen i5 or i7 CPUs. More I/O options than a raspberry Pi and beats a Raspberry Pi many many times over in performance. Including onboard media transcoding via QuickSync. By the time you add a power supply, SD card or add-on board for a nvme m.2 drive the price of the Raspberry Pi is going to be same as what a mini-PC with more hardware options and performance is going to cost.
Regarding lack of GPIO - if you're going to use it for a server, then not sure why GPIO is even needed. But if you need GPIO for hardware interfacing, then plenty of much cheaper boards out there than the raspberry Pi. Such as the dozens of different types of ESP32 boards.
As for power draw - yes, a mini-pc will definitely draw more power. I guess it depends on electricity cost at your specific location. I'm currently running about 25 containers on a HP elitedesk G2 with a Intel i5. On average it draws about 15-20 watts. It can go high as 40 watts when I'm streaming something from Jellyfin that requires real-time transcoding.
As I said above, used is not an option for anything other than a hobby. You found a great used PC for $100. Awesome, now get me 50 more of those with the same specs and price. And don’t forget to make sure every power supply, RAM and SSD is working properly.
I have a used m75q running 16 full blown windows server vms and a few Linux servers and it draws about 35w and cost me $200 all in with 2tb of m.2 and 64gb of DDR4 ram and it's still got room to grow.
I also ran a data center and an MSP where we always sourced used servers and never had issues with them running for longer than their intended 4 to 5 year lifespan.
I have pretty heavy workloads I run for side projects for friends and run everything on 3com gig switches I also got used. HP still warranties them and releases firmware.
Schools use off lease hardware other than chrome books that get beaten to death by kids without problems for years.
I really fail to see your argument against used hardware.
The pi ecosystem has become a total accessory one where you need non standard power supplies and video adapters to connect them up where a single used desktop PC gives more value and less points of failure - and when things do fail you can find readily available off the shelf parts to fix them.
You need 50 of those to run at home for selfhosting/homelab? I've bought a few. Never had any issues. They're not hard to find if you need them in bulk. But then again, most people don't need 50 of them or even more than a few for home use. Amazon renewed sells mini-PCs and you can just as easily return them if there are issues. If you need 50 of them, then your use case is for enterprise or business use. You should probably not look at a raspberry pi then either.
Even if you don't want to buy on secondary market because concerns around ram, power supply or SSD. Then even a new mini-PC running something like a Intel N100 for $100-150 will vastly outperform a Raspberry Pi 5- yet still provide better I/O options + QuickSync.
Yeah I didn't mean a NUC from Intel (who have just stopped making them anyway). I meant the Beelink kind of mini-PC or indeed some used systems which is exactly what I use, and generalised them under the term NUC. That was not very clear.
What's wrong with used gear? Especially fanless hardware that's all solid state it should last 10 to 20 years without problems unless someone abused it and even then the wear part is the solid state drive at a reasonable price.
For some situations yes new and warrantied hardware is a non debatable topic but who is using a pi for mission critical stuff and expects it to be robust enough to not fail?
Of course, but if you are trying to do something which requires GPIO or want to build on top of Rapsberry Pi's other functionality (i.e. the cameras) your options are more limited.
I haven't bought any in a while, but looks like the Pi Zero W is in stock and available for $10 at Microcenter. Other sellers seem to have them in stock for $15. So isn't there already a widely available Pi in stock for under $20?
This is accidentally a fantastic example of the issues with the original commenter's train of thought. Not everyone needs every single feature, but every single feature is needed individually by someone.
yeah, with how many "maker" things have emerged around RPi, it's a bit of a dickpunch to be removing features that a nontrivial portion of the user base are building projects/products around.
Hopefully we have gotten past the "RPi is for education, not makers!" thing, there is really zero traction on big computer labs full of raspberry pis. even insofar as it's used in education it's still used for maker tasks, people building robots with computer vision or whatever, and some of those use-cases need the encoder too.
RPi has always been a somewhat incoherent product that survived because it was a below-average solution to any problem, the jack-of-all-trades for $45 (plus another $100 of accessories). If it doesn't have video encode, why would I want this for plex instead of a NUC clone? why would I buy this instead of a big AVR32/STM32 microcontroller for building a robot? Why would I want this instead of a Bus Pirate for GPIO? Why would I want to use this as a mini-desktop if I can't even do a Teams call on it? Etc etc. It's barely an adequate product even with all the legacy feature set there, if you start pulling pieces off then competing products become even more compelling for many use-cases.
Reality is they will probably be fine because of the name recognition and brand but it's not good management either.
I'd love to see real numbers but just like with the RX 6500XT I just can't imagine the encoder is that big. We are talking about pennies more per die, and likely this will cost them more in total sales than the pennies represent in the total product cost - you are saving 0.1% of the MSRP and losing 5-10% of potential addressable market. Literally would just be better for them to eat the cost, almost certainly.
And you are correct that while nobody uses all the features, everybody uses some of them.
I frankly do not understand the decision to depart from mainstream SOC configurations here - which obviously would have an encoder.
> RPi has always been a somewhat incoherent product that survived because it was a below-average solution to any problem, the jack-of-all-trades for $45 (plus another $100 of accessories).
In addition to what you wrote: it also has a really good software story. Everybody's got a build for raspberry pi. Something like an odroid or banana pi or whatever has a much more "gotta handle all the builds yourself" path. The power of being the standard, I suppose.
> Why would I want to use this as a mini-desktop if I can't even do a Teams call on it?
You can do a Teams call on it (with prerelease software). See two Pis conferencing that way here (call was slightly glitchy until one guy on the call figured out he needed to switch from his crappy wifi to a wired connection):
It's more than $20 for everything but you can buy extension PCBs that more or less turn the Pi Zero 2W into a full-size Raspberry Pi with USB-A and Ethernet ports, also making it compatible with some full-size Pi cases.
I am using a Micro USB to Ethernet adapter on the original Zero that didn't have wireless. It's been working for years with no issues at all. That's "almost" wired.
I have found that a good chunk of random opensource projects won't run on the zero 2. The ARM core is ARM7 and doesn't support modern instructions, so plenty of software just immediately dies with 'Illefal Instruction'.
Also, it's 32 bit, and a lot of software is starting to depend on the massive address spaces offered by 64 bit.
And there is no high ram model. Some stuff just gobbles so much ram that 512M isn't practical.
Totally fair desire, though some people definitely do want these to be desktop or HTPC replacements.
I'm usually more impressed with RockChip stuff anyway, though, so if the Raspberry Pi folks wanted to focus their efforts on affordable dev boards, I think there'd still be plenty of options for those who do want to play back 4k video on a monitor.
They've done an excellent job with the Pi Pico, keeping it in stock and dirt cheap. I've gotten a dozen or more of those at like $4 each. So they're still catering to the "maker" types with those.
I'm excited to get a better version of something like the Pinebook Pro someday, based on a newer SoC with more RAM and a bit more GPU power for video playback and some simpler games like Minetest and Xonotic.
I agree, they could make two models that cater both the markets they are gong for which are "mini servers" for lans and iot where no one needs to look at the monitor and you access it with ssh/vnc, and "mini desktops" for education where an active user sits in front of a monitor.
So:
- Pi Server: without all the stuff that not belong in it -- for a cheap price like you said
- Pi Desktop: with all the stuff that belongs there -- for a premium price.
Of course this means double design, double production line, double testing,. support, etc. And will most likely reduce revenue. This is probably why they go with the all in one approach.
Different people have different needs though. I have a smart mirror that runs a 4K display driven by a Pi 4. I'm sure there a lot of other kiosk-like use-cases for Pis.
I want less powerful pis with more hardware features.
Everyone else is getting onboard battery management and AI coprocessors and stuff, the Pi is busy trying to run on expensive SSDs because for some reason they don't just fix their software to run better on SDs(And lots of apps seem uninterested in fixing SD write issues).
There are other flavors of Pi, like the Orange Pi or Banana Pi. Have you looked into those? The newest Orange Pi is really expensive but maybe there's others that are cheaper
Yes, for context the Pi 1-4 all had H264 hardware encoder/decoder support, which could comfortable encode at least 720p @ 30Hz in realtime. The die space argument makes sense for why they don't have AV1/HEVC encoding, but it does not explain why H264 was dropped. The fact that the CPU is now powerful enough to encode H264 at better quality and frame rates than the old hardware encoder is a better argument, but still a step backwards for folks who need lower power consumption or need the CPU for other things, and doesn't explain why the hardware support needed to be dropped. It really does sound like something else (like licensing) drove the decision, and this is a post-facto attempt to sell/justify that decision.
Encode is always a bit messier; perhaps you need a tool which is not GPU aware, maybe your needs go beyond what the encoder can do.
But dropping the hardware h.264 decoder is a horrible thing to do. H.264 might as well be the lingua franca of online videos. Think of all the kids in classrooms loading videos on Youtube now constantly hammering the CPU for decode. It's such a weird decision that it can only be caused by business issues.
Even on mobile? I sincerely hope when I play a YouTube video on my iPhone it's using the built-in decoder hardware rather than churning through what may as well be Google's proprietary codec on the CPU but I guess I have no way of knowing.
It is a bit frustrating how married the Raspberry Pi foundation is to a company that couldn't care less if they live or die. Broadcom has always been at best indifferent and at worst hostile to the open source community.
Broadcom is one of the few options out there for ARM SoC. Rpi could dump a bunch of money into making their own SoC, but that would really ballon the costs.
They couldn't use Rockchip or Allwinner or Texas Instruments chips? Sure there is some work they would have to do all over again getting the drivers working and reliable, but in the long run the partnership could be far better for the company.
Qualcomm is the single worst company to work with. They try to negotiate % of revenue deals instead of cost-per-unit deals and they make Broadcom look like Stallman-level open source fanatics.
I'm guessing you're not a fan of Google Wear watches or Microsoft Surface ARM at all or you'd be more aware of how Qualcomm treats their gift horses worse than I've seen any company. We are talking 10 year old mediocre designs being shown off as their flagship parts in some cases here and I'd expect if they did turn over the Pi to Qualcomm you'd get the best 2015 $100 phones had to offer as the SoC
In reality being a single big customer for one vendor is far more influential than being a small one with other options.
In what world? the one where firms don't compete?
If other firms are explicitly on the table for the currently negotiated and next generation RPi, Broadcom will have more incentive to meet the RPi Foundation's specific needs. If Broadcom knows that RPi is not talking to other vendors, then their negotiating position is stronger.
In the real world. I’ve been working for large vendors for literal decades and I can tell you outright that you own us if you’re a big customer, even if we are the only vendor in sight, and no one gives a shit if you’re spreading out your business.
This is 100% a natural consequence of the need to make your quarter. A bigger deal is much more influential than a small one, consistently. Sales incentives also do this.
People who have not actually worked in the industry with a solid eye for how this works often think that having multiple vendors is a good answer, but it’s not. Having optionality helps, but in the end it’s all about deal size.
Are you saying the hardware actually has encode on die but was "fused" off?
If so, Raspberry Pi has an organizational culture of outright lying, as opposed to simply speaking plainly. I know this is not Eben Upton speaking, but I've found him many times in the past being either evasive with the truth, or simply lying. It's one thing to not step of the toes of partners, or to not Osborne a product by suggesting a successor is nearing, but to be outright dishonest. Yuck.
> Are you saying the hardware actually has encode on die but was "fused" off?
I don't think that is what they are saying, and I haven't seen any evidence of that. It makes the most sense to me that either (as GP said) they got rid of the H264 hardware to save on paying Broadcom for the rights to include that hardware block in the chip, or to save on the die area they take up (as RPi said), or both.
"In future we’ll have to do something, but for Pi 5 we feel the hardware encode is a mm^2 too far."
Sounds reasonable, given a fast cpu & less-than optimal hw-accelerated encoding options. As for that "something", maybe:
1) Drop hw-accelerated encoding and decoding entirely, and use the freed up silicon for much beefier cpus (like ones including -bigger- vector units, more cores etc. Cortex X?). That would be useful for any cpu heavy applications.
2) Include hw encoder for a common (1), relatively 'heavy' codec. And hw decoder for same + maybe others.
3) Only include decoder(s?), like they seem to have done for RPi5.
4) Include some kind of flexible compute fabric that can be configured to do the heavy lifting for popular video codecs.
Combined with:
5) Move to newer silicon node to obtain higher efficiency or transistor budget.
Whatever route a future RPi would go, imho hw-accelerated decoding is much more useful than encoding.
It's fair to say that not all Pi users are decoding video, but with the number of projects doing some sort of video-related workloads, with Pi's processing camera footage and doing CV work and people using Pi's as low power workstations as just two examples, it's reasonable that folks that had historically used Raspberry Pi compute units for video are disappointed to hear that they're now pushing a lot of CPU power to perform video decode and encode.
i have three pi's in my house. One that runs my plotter, one that runs my 3d printer and one that's, up until recently (I've moved it into my kube cluster), running pihole. shrug
That’s somewhat understandable, but still a bit disappointing. Not all playback devices support HEVC, and additionally HEVC will likely remain patent-encumbered much longer than e.g. H.264.
I really wish there was at least one other and open hardware-accelerated format. It’s probably a bit too early for AV1, but VP9 would work with modern iOS and Android devices, for example.
I also wonder how much licensing costs were a concern here, although past RPis had software-unlockable codecs for that exact reason.
The rk3588 and rk3588s (i.e. orange pi 5) both support hardware H264/HEVC encoding @ 8k30fps, as well as hardware HEVC/VP9 decoding @ 8k60fps, H264 decoding @ 8k30fps, AV1 decoding @ 4k60fps.
Yes, and there are more advantages to the Orange Pi 5 SBCs:
- They have full size HDMI
- They have an m.2 connector
- They still have an audio jack
- They have more powerful performance cores
- They have low performance cores
- They have a 6 TOPS NPU
On the other hand, that cheap base model has no built-in wifi, but so you can add it in the m.2 slot.
For me, the Raspberry Pi 5 is quite disappointing.
But hey, the good thing is that maybe this will push more of the community to the RK3588(S) based boards.
Nobody needs that GPU. Alyssa Rosenzweig stopped working on the driver and got poached by Valve.
Also, real time encoding with VP8 (yes, that is the standard for WebRTC) barely works. It has barely enough CPU power to produce a working demo, but too little to actually do anything with it.
Can you expand on this? Is the hardware too slow, too power hungry, or just badly supported? At least coming from ARM there must be some hardware documentation on how they work. I mean, it can't be worse than Broadcom's all-proprietary GPUs.
In fact, she just no longer leads panfrost, but still reviews panfrost-related merge requests from time to time. Boris took over her place, and even panvk2 is on its way. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/bbrezillon
Mali-G610MP4 is known to handle Genshin impact easily. (https://youtu.be/sA55S2Z7gLo?t=56) I doubt VideoCore VII can do that. As of today, there is still no detailed spec sheet for this GPU.
opi5 16gb is about 130 usd, rpi5 is about 80 usd I think? You get twice the cores and RAM so I think they're comparable value. But it's sort of academic for me because rpi5 8GB is not in stock in Australia.
Surprisingly, AV1 is easier to implement a decoder for than VP9 (by design). Some of the VP9 transforms were axed with AV1 purely to make the stream easier to decode.
Why AV1 hardware decoding has taken so long seems to be an issue with hardware manufactures not wanting to support it. HEVC and VVC seem to have more hardware support.
HEVC was built from the ground up to be implemented in hardware to stem the tide of the open-source codecs and thus keep the license money train running.
Ah, yes, I do agree on the quality – it certainly can't compete in any way with high-quality software or dedicated encoders.
But arguably it doesn't have to; many real-time applications (e.g. surveillance cameras) have local bandwidth to spare and/or don't care too highly about quality, and compatibility with older viewing devices without re-encoding is a priority.
If compatibility is a priority and bandwidth isn't an issue, MJPEG is still the way to go and is by far the most common encoding I see in security cameras.
On the other hand you could get cool stuff from the video encoding hardware, such as access to motion vectors on the cheap: https://github.com/osmaa/pinymotion
I wonder though if the OpenGL ES3.1 compute could be used for this purpose on it.
If bandwidth ain't much of an issue, can just dump frames to a separate device for encoding, aside, Can't imagine someone using a pi 5 just for camera usage (aside from projects needing cameras)
Maybe not only for cameras, but also for cameras. And when doing other things simultaneously, a video encoder not hogging all processing power becomes even more important.
Last time I tried to encode a video from H.264 to HEVC (hw-accelerated) on Linux it was such a pain to get to work that I eventually gave up and simply accepted the performance hit. I'm sorry, but I'm not gonna recompile ffmpeg so that it works on my machine. Considering that most RPi-users probably use a Linux-based OS this is IMHO a sensible decision.
Well it's not that uncommon to use a version of ffmpeg with more features enabled for a specific purpose. For instance my jellyfin server uses jellyfin-ffmpeg[0] to do hardware acceleration, even on my Pi.
For hardware acceleration it's probably easier to use gstreamer, depending on what device you are using to decode. But then you have a whole new problem.
Well, to quote Gordon Hollingworth on the original post:
"In future we’ll have to do something, but for Pi 5 we feel the hardware encode is a mm^2 too far."
Also, Raspberry Pi Foundation and Broadcom have been really working together on successors since the... BCM2787 in the Raspberry Pi 3, if I remember correctly? Broadcom still reserves the right to sell to anyone, but the Pi is still the primary customer for those specific chips now.
There are a ton of pi derivatives that offer a pretty broad range of configurations. I always think of the Pi as the general consumer flagship. I was still pretty impressed with the Pi 4B... I just wish it had broader availability.
Yeah, there's a huge variety of SBCs that exist, most of which have a better specs/price ratio than RPi. If you buy a RPi, you're spending money on the hardware, you're spending it on the mountains of support/tutorials/standardization. I suspect that most people on HN can handle the reduced knowledge base that exists for BPi, OPi, ROCK, etc.
Jetson Orin Nano, the new devkit from Nvidia, surprisingly does not have a hardware video encoder either, you'll need use CPU to encode video instead, which is extremely odd considering video-encoding is a common use case on lots of video applications.
Wow, I was shocked to see that. They don't even bother using CUDA cores to encode (less of an issue if you have unified memory like in Jetsons). Anyway it seems you can get four 1080p streams at 30fps encoded to h264 in CPU if you set it up right: https://www.ridgerun.com/post/jetson-orin-nano-how-to-achiev...
Only removed from the tegras, not the gaming cards.
But yeah if you were doing OBS streaming on your jetson, then the newer hardware won't have NVENC. Normally I'd say "but nobody is doing that" but someone (was) indeed doing exactly that, lol.
As mentioned it's probably a ton more relevant to embedded and robotics/computer-vision use-cases, which NVIDIA is really trying to push for (automotive etc). So it's still a surprising change and will be a pain for some people.
h264 is the most available but probably not the most used. Every streaming service today either seeds AV1, VP9, or HEVC content first since it saves bandwidth[0] and every client from the past 5 years supports one of these newer formats (phones, GPUs, smart TVs, streaming boxes, etc).
H.264 is effectively the MP3 of video today: It provides neither the best quality, nor is it patent free (yet), but if an SoC supports any hardware accleration at all, H.264 is usually on the list.
Applications/services that can afford the overhead of multiple format encoding will do so, but it's not always an option.
Most devices can indeed most likely handle software decode of more common resolutions, codecs and bitrates. But I'd really hope they'd pick the one that won't suck up all the battery, so H264. This line of thought is supported by the fact that YouTube still provides an H264 option with most if not all videos.
With higher bitrate things, HEVC seems to grow in popularity but even software decode support is not everywhere. Netflix for example requires the installation of HEVC support on Windows to play 4K content.
Actually hardware-accelerated video decode is even spottier and more unreliable across most platforms. The JS API for codec support (canPlayType) literally returns "maybe" and "probably". It's quite bad.
So far the best compatibility I've seen has been Edge with flags on Windows (MPEG-2, H264, HEVC, AV1, VP8, VP9 with most also supporting accelerated encode). It still fails with some content (Dolby Vision P5 colors are incorrect, HEVC Rext doesn't play - more info about HEVC is available here https://github.com/StaZhu/enable-chromium-hevc-hardware-deco...). Chrome on macOS is a close second in terms of codec support.
The worst in terms of HW acceleration being all the browsers on desktop Linux-s, few and fragile combinations that offer limited and janky support. But it's slowly improving. This combined with the not-the-latest hardware many use, means things like VP9 or AV1 tend to stutter.
I'd love to see some more generic stats, but considering the APIs aren't sufficient to determine actual support, these might be difficult to gather.
But all things considered, I heavily doubt dropping H264 HW decode support was a good idea considering how often its still used.
The largest VOD services stopped using H.264 in any meaningful way or only as a last resort, bandwidth is just too expensive to justify using it. Even phones in third world countries include VP9 and HEVC hw decode, it's rare to run into someone who can only play H.264 unless you are walking in sub-Saharan Africa.
If you look at the scene (aka piracy) every rip from every service is in AVC for FHD or HEVC for UHD. I know you mentioned last resort but the only legit streaming service I have at the moment is Apple TV+ and on fire tv’s at least they are sending h264
I’m also in iptvland and every rip from every live service is in h264 as well, with rare UHD feeds using h265 with HLG for HDR
(For clarification, rip means the exact bits sent from the service with no reencoding, just stripping drm)
True, but hardware support does wonders for power consumption. I'm blown away that I can watch 3 hours of h264 content on my flights and only 5% of my iPad battery is used. i.e. more factors to consider than simply whether it can/can't with brute force.
No lyin'. I have an iPad Pro 12.9", 5th generation. I download content on Netflix, Prime, and to VLC prior to flights. During flights I have the iPad in airplane mode and use my AirPod Pros for audio. On my flights from California to Texas, ~3 hrs, I use somewhere between 5-8% battery life. Brightness is probably on the low side because the cabin is dim.
Airplane mode (turning off most of the wireless) seems to be a big factor as well.
Remember you can get an HP Prodesk G3 400 or some such for $60 refurbed with far more hardware capabilities if you don't need the portable form factor, gpio, or power consumption.
Right, I agree, but electricity prices are variable and location dependent, for example, it doesn't cost me 30c/kwh, it's more like 5 cents and 3 cents depending on the time.
With that logic, the $20 in difference of $30 per year vs $10 per year of Pi is fairly meaningless for performance boost I am getting.
If your electricity is expensive, sure, but I imagine the performance boost would be worth it for an actual homeserver that a G3 can make vs a tinkering/fun project you can make with a Pi.
You're comparing a CPU that became generally available in 2017 or earlier (i.e., the 7th-gen or 6th-gen Core CPU in the Prodesk G3) with a more much recent CPU.
The rk3588 and rk3588s both support hardware H264/HEVC encoding @ 8k30fps, as well as hardware HEVC/VP9 decoding @ 8k60fps, H264 decoding @ 8k30fps, AV1 decoding @ 4k60fps.
Maybe my expectations for RPi 5 are too high, but it’s hard to imagine that an SBC manufacturer known as the industry standard removed the H.264 decoder & encoder from their latest product instead of adding VP9 and AV1, causing users to go crazy when YouTube playback dropped frames. Not to mention serving up transcoded content as a media server.
Good news is that I've been playing around with its competing products. For those users who want a normal media server experience in 2023, Jellyfin will support RK3588 full hardware accelerated transcoding, includes AV1 decode, subtitle burn-in and HDR tone-mapping. (WIP https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-ffmpeg/issues/34#issuec...)
The quite popular Logitech C920 webcam used to natively support H.264, but they dropped it in a model revision a while ago, because "nearly every computer offered in the market features a chipset that can efficiently encode high definition video at 1080p" [1].
I've used that very camera (without the accelerator) on an RPi 4 myself, and the only way to get acceptable quality was by using the Pi's H.264 hardware encoder.
I got a metal box with HDMI and an ethernet ports which encodes the HDMI video + audio and serves/publishes H.264 RTMP/TS segments. My intended use case was actually working with Pi's on live streams, installing fresh systems and the like where encoding might not be available anyway.
I couldn't find the one online but it looks like there are a few out there. Side note/tangent, the Pi3 was powerful enough to transcode 720p down to lower resolutions in real time.
That is a capture card and not an encoder card. It does not feature any accelerated encoding and relies on the host system to provide the video encoding, usually via a dedicated or integrated GPU.
For $85, the Orange Pi 5 supports 8K hardware video encoding (H265/H264) via gstreamer, and that's just what I'm aware of. I'm sure there are other single-board computers with similar (or better) features.
Unless you're dependent on the Raspberry Pi HAT ecosystem or you're not particularly technical, it's worth considering the alternatives.
The title doesn't seem to match the content. The comments are talking about hardware accelerated encode but I didn't see anything about accelerated decode being dropped.
The information is spread over multiple comments, I could only link to one comment and thought just linking to the main article would be confusing as the article itself doesn't mention it.
Interesting. Thankfully, LibreElec think the Raspberry Pi 5 is strictly better, despite shifting to software decoding:
> BCM2712 supports HEVC 4K60 hardware decoding. It no longer supports H264 in hardware. This might sound odd but it removes the RPi4’s 1080p restriction on H264 decoding and the 4K H264 test media we have has played. The big increase in performance from the Quad-Core A76 chip means RPi5 can software decode AV1, H264, VC1, VP9, and more at 1080p with ease
I think it's a really weak excuse of Gordon Hollingworth "On the processor you have more control over the output". The one on the pi 1-4 worked totally fine and nobody complained about its quality.
Don't forget you can always do software if you want to, it was just really great to have the hardware option.
The question is about encoding.
It is significantly parallelizable because you are doing a search for the best encoding you can find.
Also at a micro level there are things like motion search for which vector ops are useful. So I would say that it's likely they will look into that.
Wow, I'm surprised this took this long to come out! The raspicam/raspivid ecosystem is huge and without hardware h264 encoding it is absolutely dead in the water. This makes the rPi5 a neutered bit of hardware and the rPi4 (and even the rPi3) better options for quite a number of applications!
I'm not sure how you could get to that conclusion from the link?
>[...] but actually it only takes around 1 processor to encode 1080p60 with our default settings (which is still better quality than the PI 4 hardware encoder)
Power consumption is worse, yes, but that is not a huge issue for the raspicam/raspivid ecosystem you are talking about.
If anything the price is a huge issue, so just buy the pi4 if the hardware suffices or the 5 if you need something better.
Or... Does the SoC have support for such things, but there is no software API yet, either because nobody has had time to write it, or someone chose not to pay for the licenses?
They say it can encode 1080p60 (for the context, I guess it's real time) using just one processor (again, I'm guessing he means "one core"), and with a better quality than the RPi4 hardware encoder. They think it could be possible to encode 4K at 24fps with some work, but they're not right now going for that optimizations.
