If it is like other similar chips (Samsung etc.) then its main GPU has nothing to do with mpeg. There are independent accelerators for 2d, 3d, video decoding, windowing, rotation and jpeg, and they technically may be present in any combination. They are controlled with completely different register sets mapped to different i/o addresses. If one of them is not present, it is just not present. The PowerVR 3d core is theoretically capable of doing 2d on its shaders in OpenGL too, like any GPGPU used for computations, but this is not the usual way.

Probably nobody ever tried it. I don't think it's intended for African schoolchildren - its original intention was to help UK Computing students. As one of them, let me tell you, the computer science lessons we have are dire, boring, uninspiring, and do not teach you how to actually program properly. I would like to see how they could be integrated into a coursework module; perhaps the low processing power would encourage optimised applications and limited resources would lead to unique solutions - and maybe if younger programmers learn this then the next Windows OS won't need 8 GB of RAM? Not only that.

The RPi will also promot bloatware and mindless library reuse. Teach programming fits on a simple 8 bit machine with limited resources like 8 k rom en 128 bytes ram and give students something to chew on.

We already have truckload of 'library using' codemonkeys. What we don't have enough off are people that can actually code something without an operating system and massive prechewed libraries, or without wasting 5000 calls to a library to configure some i/o pins. Programming is not about a language.

It is about mechanism and learning to use the cpu and its hardware effectively to perform work. People wrote whole bookkeeping and payroll programs in a PET with 20k ram and a casette. They landed on the moon with 14K of code. And that thing was multitasking, flying the lander,doing radar ranging and tons of other things.

I was reading here and the article said that linux distros often use free versions of MPEG2. On my Raspberry Pi, however, I had to purchase a license to achieve. Raspberry Pi Mpeg 2 License Keygen Crack >>shorl.com/pustatodebruvy 102d75a83e raspberry pi MPEG2 license OpenElec plugin [bookmarkified itler.net/raspberry-pi-code.

All at the same time. With a clock in the kilohertz range. Now we have cellphones with quadcore 2 GHz and six core graphics accelerators. To play 'angry birds'. I foresee a VERY grim future. Forget global warming.the global dumbing down is coming.

Go wathc the movie 'idiocracy'. We're not far off. Now even the bootloader won't fit in that anymore. And turning on a LCD or plasma tv and staring at the manufacturer splashscreen for 10 seconds is perfectly acceptable. Because it has to 'boot'. And don't get me started on blu-ray and dvd players.

The people who write that code these days should be publicly forced to eat that tv. I have an old daewoo dvd player. Power-on to first image is under a second. Pop in a dvd disc, it spins up and 2 seconds later i have the dvd menu. It has a braindead mips processor running at 27MHz for the video processing and decoding and a 8051 to do remote control,display and operate the drive mechanism. Works beautifully.

Compare this to my latest blu ray player. Power on to first splash screen is also 2 seconds and then there is the scroll bar with 'initializing. That takes 30 seconds because it wants to go all wonky and see if it can get an update from the internet ( i have no cable plugged in. Why do you keep waiting you piece of shit. Can't you do a simple 'cable detect' that would take 1 microsecond. ) and it needs to boot some open-sores / broken-source operating system.

Then you put in a disc and you stare at a black screen for another 20 seconds while the drive is grinding away trying to load the java code to run on the virtual machine. What is wrong with the processor that is in the box?

Why do you need to run a virtual machine on top of it? You blithering codemonkeys! Just write code for the real processor you flaming-turd-code-shitters. Sony should rename themselves to ShitCo. And then it goes through some handshaking on the crypto and if you are really lucky you may get the menu ( if it hasn't crashed by now ), if you are a bit less lucky it comes with a message that it needs internet connection to check for an update.

Here you have a carrier medium that can hold 50 gigabytes of data, and you tell me there is no room for a bit of code? And then you finally have gone through all the hoops, select 'main feature' and press play and it first goes off for another 10 second 'grinding session'.

If i want to enjoy a movie that i bought i have to sit there jumping through updates, endless waiting, and all sorts of misery before i can see something ( and then i haven't even started ranting an raving about all the 'coming soon drab' they inject on the disc. Don't you understand that, if i watch this disc 1 year later that stuff is old and i don't want to see the 'coming ssoon crap anymore? Put it on the disc if you must but do not start playing that shit by default!

Friggin shit-for-brains movie studio's ) And this is acceptable practice these days? Anyone that writes and release such code should be banished for eternity and locked in a room full of eproms, each loaded with a single byte of their code.

Eproms that are in ceramic dil packages so they always land on the floor with their pins turned upward. And they go in barefoot.

If you know what i mean. ( if you have ever stepped barefoot on an upturned dil package, you do know what i mean. Multiply that one package by a few million, one chip per byte of crap code. My guess is about 16 megabytes of code in a blueray.

Eternity isn't long enough for those nitwits. I did that when I was 17. I worked at BPI Microsystems and we wrote G/L, A/R, A/P, payroll, inventory and cost accounting for CBM/PET and Apple ][, later the VIC20 and C64, C128, Apple IIc, IIgs, Apple III ( or Apple ///) and the Olivetti M20 (they paid us to port our code). That was all done in BASIC. I did some 6502 coding on the 9090 hard drive firmware back then, too.

I think I still have the hard drive schematics and firmware source code; it was a lot of the same code as was in the PET ROMs -- bit banging the IEEE-488 bus, similar internal layout as the PETs. That made it pretty easy to wrap your head around the drive firmware, it just looked like another PET inside. Or decap and get die photos, then reverse-engineer the layout. SoCs are usually laid out in well-defined blocks with connections to a common bus, so there is only a need to focus on the desired sections.

There are various companies in China that can do this for (relatively) cheaply if the process size isn't too small. I've read that Broadcom uses hidden tricks like different register addresses and datasheets for each customer, so that leaked info could easily be traced back to its source. This is a strong deterrent against anyone doing so. Quote We already have truckload of 'library using' codemonkeys. What we don't have enough off are people that can actually code something without an operating system and massive prechewed libraries. Then you put in a disc and you stare at a black screen for another 20 seconds while the drive is grinding away trying to load the java code to run on the virtual machine.

And this is acceptable practice these days? Anyone that writes and release such code should be banished for eternity and locked in a room full of eproms. You thought you've seen the worst. How about the people who buy iPhones or Galaxy S III's just 'cause it's the most expensive and those idiots who claim their iPhone 4S's has a much better then my Sensation HOW about those 'fanboys' we know as abominations All of them are blind to what their phone is actually made to do but in my opinion you know what's the worst abomination of a 'invention'?

Pay a big premium and still you don't even get to be able to play flash apps and videos Those media boxes have android and costs like 200$ onwards and you only get a meagre 800MHz Dual Core ARM chip! This would be okay if this was 2005! Heck, for the price premiums one pays for smart TVs i can easily build a entire PC with a full featured HD5450 and an Intel chip! My parents were on the hunt for a new LED-backlit TV, (I'm not gonna talk about the cheap ones, POS) saw a few but only one 46' caught my eye but again, the 'abomination' is in it and phillips ain't making a non-smart tv version. Why i say it caught my eye? A standard 46' cheapie (the good ones?

No one has a 46' non smart TV) would already cost 999$ The phillips has a 400Hz panel and it has those 'Smart/Stupid TV things' and a 14bit video DAC for only 1399$ but i must say. Who the heck needs a 14bit DAC on a TV? A samsung ( no one else sold a 400Hz that day.

) 400Hz goes for 1799$ without ANYTHING. I don't think it's intended for African schoolchildren - its original intention was to help UK Computing students. As one of them, let me tell you, the computer science lessons we have are dire, boring, uninspiring, and do not teach you how to actually program properly. I would like to see how they could be integrated into a coursework module; perhaps the low processing power would encourage optimised applications and limited resources would lead to unique solutions - and maybe if younger programmers learn this then the next Windows OS won't need 8 GB of RAM? I'm not quite sure how the hardware can influence this? Surely the problem with the lesson content is the lesson content? As I understand it, almost every schoolchild/student needs to have access to a PC today to write their essays and assignments?

I have the impression that hand written essays are no more. If that is the case, then there are many inspiring programming environments available on PCs, not least of which is Visual Studio Express. Just for fun, here are the machines I first learned programming on when I was at school: (Ooh!

Shiny!) And note that the PDP-11 and PDP-10 ran proper multi-user, multitasking, time sharing operating systems in a memory space generally measured in kilobytes. (Megabytes were for millionaires.) On the downside, software engineering concepts like structured programming and modularity were not part of the lesson plans. Would they even be today, I wonder?

Why Do I Need To Do This? The Raspberry Pi was designed to be an educational computer. As part of that educational mission, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has gone out of their way to minimize the manufacturing and licensing costs in order to keep the final cost of the device down. Part of their cost cutting measures included not purchasing a pricey blanket license to use the MPEG-2 and VC-1 video codecs. This doesn’t mean the Raspberry Pi is not capable of decoding media encoded in MPEG-2 or VC-1, but that by default the codecs cannot run on the Raspberry Pi hardware for want of a proper license. Fortunately the Raspberry Pi Foundation was able to make arrangements to sell individual licenses for each codec very inexpensively. If you’re wondering whether or not you’re the target audience for this license sale program and this tutorial, check to see if any of the following statements apply to you: I’m using my Raspberry Pi as a media center and/or general purpose device and I wish to: • Watch DVDs (either straight from an attached DVD drive or from ripped.ISO files).

In this case you need an MPEG-2 license to decode the video on the DVDs. • Watch my collection of AVI files. While AVI is technically a container format, not a codec, the vast majority of AVI files are encoded using MPEG-2 and as such you’ll need an MPEG-2 license. • Watch content I’ve ripped or recorded using Windows Media Center (such as movies or television shows in the WMV container format). For this you’ll need the VC-1 license.

If you’re unsure if you have the files types in question there are two simple ways to check. First, you can try to load the file in your Raspberry Pi media center. If the file is, for example, an MPEG-2 encoded video file there is a very high chance that the audio track will play just fine but the video track will fail to render, leaving the screen black. The more precise way to check is to examine the file itself using a tool like —you can follow along with.

MediaInfo will tell you the specific video codec for any video file you examine. What Do I Need? For this tutorial we’re assuming you’ve already got your hands on a Raspberry Pi unit and installed your operating system of choice on it. Further, we’ll be using a copy of Raspbmc for this tutorial under the assumption that many of our readers and would now like to add in DVD/WMV support to their build. Even if you are using another Raspberry Pi distribution, the command line instructions and the manual configuration are still applicable to you and your Pi unit.

We’ll be covering two methods: adding the license code manually and via Raspbmc—a popular Raspberry Pi-enabled distribution of XBMC. To follow along you’ll need the following things: • An MPEG-2 (~$4)and/or VC-1 license(~$2) purchased from the Raspberry Pi store. • Access to the command prompt on the Raspberry Pi (either at the physical device or via SSH). First, we will walk you through getting the serial number off the board and purchasing the licenses you need. After that, we’ll show you how to manually add the licenses to your Pi or use the built-in tool within Raspbmc. Tanner V15 Cracker there. Purchasing the Licenses In order to purchase the licenses you need, you will have to retrieve the unique serial number for your Raspberry Pi board.

This number is not printed anywhere on the circuit board but is instead stored in the hardware; it must be retrieved using the command prompt. Retrieving the Serial Number: First, visit the command prompt either at the actual terminal or remotely connected to the terminal via an SSH tool such as. If you have a keyboard attached to your Raspbmc machine, simply select “Exit” out of the Raspbmc interface via the power button in the lower left hand side of the GUI. Press ESC to load the command prompt instead of booting back into the Raspbmc GUI. This will deposit you at the command prompt. Alternatively, if you would like to access the command prompt remotely, fire up your SSH client (such as PuTTY) and enter the IP address of your Rasperry Pi unit. Whether you have pulled up the command prompt directly at the machine or via SSH you will be prompted to login.

The default login/password combination for Raspbmc is pi / raspberry. Once at the command prompt enter the following command: cat /proc/cpuinfo Your Pi will spit back 11 lines of text, but the only one of interest to us is the last line labeled Serial. Copy the unique 16 digital serial number (partially obfuscated in the screenshot here).

Because the license is granted to each specific Raspberry Pi board, repeat the above process for all Raspberry Pi boards you wish to purchase a license for. Once you have the the serial number for each individual unit, it’s time to purchase the licenses from the Raspberry Pi foundation. Purchasing the License: Visit the Raspberry Pi foundation’s purchase page for the and/or. Enter your Raspberry Pi serial number in the appropriate blank beneath the price. Add the license to your cart. Repeat this process for all the licenses on all the units you wish to add the codecs to. Although the foundation indicates that it could take up to 72 hours for your license to arrive via email, we received ours in about 24 hours.

When your email arrives it will include a code for each license formatted like such: decode_MPG2= decode_WVC1= The portion of the license is your unique 10-digit alphanumeric license code. Installing the Licenses Now that we have the license codes, it’s time to add them to your Raspberry Pi and get to enjoying enhanced media playback. Manually installing the licenses: The manual installation technique works for any installation on the Raspberry Pi, including Raspbmc. To manually install the codecs, you need to power down your Raspberry Pi device, remove the SD card, and mount the SD card on a computer with access to a simple text editor. Raspberry Pi SD cards include a FAT formatted mini partition that holds startup tools including an easily edited configuration file labeled config.txt.

[Note: Some operating systems builds may not automatically create a config.txt file; if there is no config.txt simply create your own.] Locate the file and make a copy, renaming it config.old—this version will serve as a backup in case anything goes wrong during the editing process. Open up the original config.txt in your text editor of choice (we’re using Notepad++). Depending on what operating system you’re running on your Pi, the configuration file may look slightly different.

Leave the existing entries alone. Cut and paste the formatted license entries you received in your email, like so: Save the config.txt file and safely eject the SD card from your computer. Return the SD card to the Raspberry Pi and power up the device. Adding the licenses via the built-in Raspbmc tool: If you’re running Raspbmc, you can skip the whole manually editing the config.txt step and take advantage of the built-in tool right inside Raspbmc.

To do so, head over to your Raspbmc device and navigate from the main interface to Programs –>Raspbmc Settings. Once you are inside Raspbmc Settings, navigate to the System Configuration Tab and scroll down to the the Advanced System Settings section: There you can click on MPEG2 and VC1 and input your license number. Don’t type in the entire string provided for you by Raspberry Pi, leave off the leading decode_MPG2= and decode_WVC1= portion. Only input the 10-digit string after the equal sign into each codec’s respective slot.

Once you have added the appropriate codec licenses, head back to the main interface and reboot your device via the power selection menu in the lower left hand corner. Testing the codecs: The most enjoyable way to test your new codecs is to fire up a media file you know wouldn’t play without it, sit back, and watch it play perfectly. The more technical way to check, should you run into any hiccups and wish to confirm that your license is recognized by the device, is to head to the command prompt and enter the following commands: vcgencmd codec_enabled MPG2 vcgencmd codec_enabled WVC1 The Pi should immediately return that the codec is enabled. Here’s the output for the MPG2 check on our test machine, for reference: Everything looks good at the command prompt and the previously audio-only files now play both their audio and video channels. For a few bucks and a few minutes of our time, we’re ready to enjoy the wide variety of videos encoded in MPEG-2 and VC-1 codecs. Have a pressing Raspberry Pi-related topic you’d love to see us address? Sound off in the comments or write in to with your suggestions.