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I have a 320GB external hard drive full of various movies, ranging in formats from MP4, MKV, and AVIs with MP3 audio to AVIs with AAC audio.

Will the Pi be able to play all these types out-of-the-box with a high success rate? If not, can I install software that will play them?

Eventually, I'm hoping to get 2 of them, set them up the same way and use them for the kids movies.

nc4pk
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user7710
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4 Answers4

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The Raspberry Pi has H.264 hardware acceleration. It also has hardware acceleration for VC-1 and MPEG-2 available after purchasing a separate licence. The H.264 acceleration comes for free, with newer pi's.

This allows media players which are capable of using hardware acceleration to easily play videos. Currently, omxplayer and OpenELEC support such acceleration.

With the correct software taking advantage of the correct hardware, your Raspberry Pi will be quite capable of video plaback.

Community
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earthmeLon
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So what I have found is that the OMXplayer on the Pi 3 will play .MP4 .MOV .AVI movies and videos but not .WMV .MOD but I haven't actually put a serious look into a solution yet to the last two. All movies stream flawlessly so far but they were under 5 minutes each, so . . . . .

Ron
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That's pretty much what I got mine for, and it's worked pretty well for me...although you have to get the right video player. I've been using omxplayer, and the only problems I've had are that fast forward/rewind seems to 'jump' several minutes per keystroke (there's probably a way around that I haven't found yet) and subtitles in the (Advanced?) SubStation Alpha format don't work quite right.

Also, I've only tried MKV and MP4 files, but they work perfectly, so I doubt the others will be much of a problem.

Zelda64fan
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I have had run my Raspberry Pi on my movie collection for days without a single hickup, and there were really many NTSC/PAL, SD/HD, MP3/AAC encoded movies in every possible combination. Please don't worry, RasPi can handle most of the things your might throw at it.

On the other hand, if you plan to play DVD copies (not recompressed to another formats), I'd recommend to spend another $2-3 and buy MP2 video licence from raspberrypi.org, this is required for accelerated DVD images playback.

The only thing I dearly miss from Raspberry Pi is the accelerated playback at 1.2x-1.5x speed, it really helps to skim through boring stuff and save plenty of time.

lenik
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