Raspberry pi 5 build

Channels DVR Server
#8

Testing Raspberry Pi 5

I have spent a few hours on this. I found that it sort of works, but I can't yet recommend it.
I don't have a Pi 5 case or Active Cooler; so I ran it case-less and compared it to my case-less spare 4B, I found:-

Requires more power. Using a WD 2TB HDD boot disk, the system would not mount with the standard Pi 15W power supply. It did mount with 40W, but required a high-spec USB cable.

It ran hotter. The base load temperature was 59C vs 51C (My production 4B in a FLIRC case 40C).

It was capable of recording 4 channels at once, the temperature after 50 mins was 68C.

Running 2 channels with Comskip, 1 thread, the temperature quickly went to 77C and returned to 70C ~10 mins after finishing. The Comskip run time was similar to 2 threads on the 4B at about 45 mins for a 70 min recording. I have not seen the FLIRC cased 4B go over ~60C with 2 threads.

Running 2 channels with Comskip, 2 thread - The temperature quickly went to 83C and appeared to still be rising. I was unable to cool it down with an external fan, it went to 86C and then shut down.

General thoughts:-

The Pi 5 requires the 25W (or better) power supply.
Uses more power than the 4B, and runs (much) hotter.
May need external power with HDD.
An Active Cooler or efficient case is essential for high loads.
The built in on/off switch is useful.
Requires Bookworm, which I found to be a "work in progress".

On the 4B with Bookworm, I found that recording 2 channels and running the Web Player on Safari on an iMac caused the 4B to become unresponsive (even with a terminal session). After 5 mins I had to do a power off.

I will stick with Bullseye on the 4B. I might buy a Cooler (fan noise?), but FLIRC will ship a 5B case soon. I hope to re-evaluate Bookworm and the Pi 5 again later. YMMV...

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BETA: Channels DVR Server for Raspberry Pi 4 (USB BOOT IMAGE)
#9

I have Channels working on the Raspberry Pi 5. It's running great and fast. Recordings seem to be better quality with fewer glitches on playback.

Configuration:
Raspberry Pi 5 with 8 GB ram
Raspberry Pi official 27 W 5 V power supply
Raspberry Pi official active cooler
Ethernet connection
SanDisk portable SSD
64-bit OS

Had trouble getting the 4GB model to run stable, even though it never showed much for usage of the ram. Not sure why it made a difference to use 8GB model.

The biggest design flaw in the Pi 5 is that it uses an unconventional USB-C power supply. Every power supply gave me a warning about being underpowered and a power to peripherals will be restricted message on booting. The official power supply works well and reliably.

The active cooler from Raspberry Pi is very much worth the $5. Easy to install and very effective at managing the thermal load.

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#10

That's good to hear. I tried the 4GB model - The 8GB model and official 27W power supply are on back order locally, with no sign of a delivery date. I did notice that htop showed more memory usage than the 4B, but still ran without using Swap. My production Pi is the 2GB model which runs well, but (obviously) takes a lot longer to run Comskip than my iMac. I'll wait until the 27W ps is delivered and then see about the 8GB model (and the "wife friendly" FLIRC) :grin:

#11

I am trying this setup as well... I have that it wants to use software encoding and not hardware... has anyone on Raspberry Pi 5 found a workaround or is this common? not sure I want to migrate from my iMac which of course uses hardware encoding but I found with frequent updates that it can pose a problem with tv watching especially if I'm not home... thoughts?

#12

There is no more hardware encoder on the RPI5 afaik

#13

Ahh.. yep... so i wonder whats better... actually. Anyone running Raspberry Pi 5 Channels DVR, do you think its better than Pi 4, worse, same? Obviously it is more heavy on power consumption, but really looking at performance. i was able to set it up but went back to my Pi4 for now. Curious on the thoughts of people testing

#14

Blockquote There is no more hardware encoder on the RPI5 afaik

Good point. :grinning:

#15

It’s hard to argue for the Rpi at this point with beelink n95s on Amazon for $119 when you catch them with a coupon.

I think that’s how much the rpi 5 is going for at most places. And then you have to buy a case and power supply and storage.

Rpi5 doesn’t even seem to be low on power anymore :confused:

Rpi will still always be one of my favorite computers of all time, but it just doesn’t really have much of a place anymore.

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#16

Good point, but for me the cheapest n95 on Amazon is AU$269. It only has a 128GB drive, so almost all of us will need the same amount of storage as you would buy for a Rpi. My local costs for the (recommended) Rpi 4B 2G are AU$74 with an additional AU$30 for a FLIRC case and AU16 for the power supply: about AU$120. I note that the n95 seems to run Windows 11 - I'm certainly not going there (unless it's OK with Linux?).

The Rpi5 is more problematic, I haven't put mine into production, partly because of supply issues with the power supply (AU$21) and that most cases need fans for cooling. FLIRC have one on back order at AU$47! - Although I can't find any performance details. All RPi 5s are now on back order here and the cheapest lists for AU$103 (4GB). As I have posted the 5 sort of works for me, but, I'm sticking with the 4B until the above issues are sorted...

#17

Since I have the RPI5 8GB in my possession and can pretty much make an exact replica of my RPI4B 8GB setup, I gonna try to run both at the same time and test out each to see difference. The N95 / N100s are a great value. I assume you don't run windows on them but instead use Linux? I also run Homebridge on another RPI5... it has been working great besides it running warm until I got a great case plus active cooler. Now its fine. I can always think about N95 / N100 or just picking up an M1 Mac Mini... I had an M2 mini that I was using but my parents needed a good computer so they got that... we have Apple computers in the house and it just makes everything easier as I can just share screen to it and never need a monitor or anything to manage... the cost though is still fairly up there for M1... maybe once M3 hits the market this year then it will cost down M1... anyway, I'll try to comment on the RPI5 setup once I put it through its paces.

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#18

I have tried RPi5 the last couple of days. Here are my takeaways:

  1. Setup is not that bad. Although it isn't explicitly laid out on a how to somewhere you can pretty much have the same setup with it running off a hard drive like the RPi4B

  2. From usage, on OTA channels I get with my HD Homerun 4K Flex, I saw some digital artifacts while watching live TV. This could be just me noticing it because I'm scrutinizing it... I tried to switch back over to my 4B setup for comparison but it was quite hard to do on the fly. I would say this is isn't an issue and maybe attestable to a poor reception issue (snow and rain was moving in) or just normal operation no different than the 4B

  3. Stations I get via IPTV TV MPEG-TS / PlutoTV HLS looked fine, no difference I could tell.

  4. I didn't record anything to check commercial detection, etc. It is still 4 cores and I typically set it to 2 Threads to do the detection so I would imagine that it would be slightly faster given the faster processors

  5. RPi5's run hot and need the 27W power supply... Amazon in the US started to carry some off brand ones besides the official one and it works great. I also recommend this case that come with the active cooler and these additional fans for the case to run off the Pi's headers in order to keep it as cool as possible

RPi5 Case w/ Active Cooler Included:

RPi 5 Case with Active Cooler

Case Fans

Case Fan

Off brand 27W Power Supply

iUniker 27W Power Supply for RPi5

With that said, current unavailability of the boards and overall cost, staying with RPi4B at the present seems to be a good idea, especially with RPi5 helping to lower the markup on RPi4B.

For my part, I had the opportunity to buy a M1 Mac Mini recently which I'm just gonna repurpose to run my Channels DVR setup, media hub and run Homebridge on. So, I'll probably be selling my RPi5's on eBay at not so much of a mark up completely built to recoup some cost. I orginally had a M2 Mac Mini running this same setup but had to give that computer to my parents as they were in desperate need of an upgrade. I didn't want to spend another $500+ plus on another M2 Mac Mini so I settled on finding a Refurb / Used M1 Mac Mini, which shockingly is still fairly expensive but is still a great value considering how well it keeps it value year to year. I figure Apple will support it with upgrades at least through 2027 if not longer.

Hope this helps anyone look to take the RPi5 plunge!

#19

I preordered the Argon ONE V3 M.2 NVME PCIe case for the Pi 5 so the storage is inside the case and the case is a heatsink.

But to your point on the N100, an N100 mini pc is only like 9W more than the Pi 5 as far as the power supply size. But I wonder if it would actually use less power since it is Intel. The specs on N100 PC that I saw says they support a 2TB SD card and a 4TB NVMe or M.2 SATA drive.

Edit - correct power and addressable storage size

#20

RP4 and RP5 Tested with different Cases

I'm retired with spare time, and have managed to source several different cases. Here are some comparison tests run over several days.

All RP5 tests were with the official 27W power supply (Very unreliable with 15W supply). The RP4 tests used the 15W supply.

Cases for the RP5: FLIRC; EDA TEC CNC solid aluminium; S2Pi Aluminium finned; Argon 5 Neo; and Raspberry Pi 5 (official) black case with Active Cooler.
RP4 cases: FLIRC Pi4; and Aluminium Armour finned.

My usual system is a 2GB Pi 4B in the Aluminium Armour case with a 2TB SSD.

Tests were undertaken with 4 tuners recording whilst watching one previous recording on an iPad; and at the same time, running Comskip with 1 or 2 cores on 3 separate sequential 75 min recordings (with a lot of adverts). Comskip test times are reported as rounded mean of the 3 recordings. Room temperature was 26-27C (air conditioned). As a comparison I also ran the same tests on an iMac-M3 with 16GB RAM and an external 2TB SSD.

Test	                           Time mins Temp C
Pi 4 - LP 1007 Finned: 2 Core Comskip	30	   61
Pi 4 - FLIRC:  2 Core Comskip       	31 	   69
Pi 5 - FLIRC:  2 Core Comskip	        18	   80
Pi 5 - FLIRC:  1 Core Comskip	        24	   68
Pi 5 - EDA TEC: 2 Core Comskip	        14	   75
Pi 5 - S2Pi Finned: 2 Core Comskip      15	   69
Pi 5 - S2Pi Finned  @ 2GHz:  2 Core 	19	   62
Pi 5 - Argon Neo 5 Lid: 2 Core Comskip	14	   66
Pi 5 - Argon Neo 5 No Lid: 2 Core	    14	   58
Pi 5 - Case & Active:  Lid - 2 Core	    15	   76
Pi 5 - Case & Active: No Lid - 2 Core	14	   65
iMac-M3 with separate 2GB SSD	         4	   Nominal

Observations: With the RP5 running Comskip with 2 cores ran hot. The performance of the cases without fan cooling could be poor. Running with the RP5 throttled to 2GHz (from 2.4GHz) with Comskip, as expected, improved the heat output but gave longer running times.
The passive cases with fins seemed better than the solid ones (as expected). The EDA TEC took a long time to heat (very hot - burns?) and took a long time to cool. Similarly the FLIRC RP5 case ran very hot, but cooled more quickly. Adding external finned heat sinks to these cases may give an improvement.

Conclusions: Using the RP5 with cases that have an active fan gave better results than those without. The FLIRC 5 and the EDA TEC may well benefit from running Comskip with one core - It is likely that their Comskip performance would still be better than that of an RP4 running 2 cores. When sufficiently cooled the RP5 halved Comskip times compared to the RP4. The performance of the iMac-M3 was considerably better than that of the RP4 and RP5.

BETA: Channels DVR Server for Raspberry Pi 4 (USB BOOT IMAGE)
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Raspberry Pi 5 announced
BETA: Channels DVR Server for Raspberry Pi 4 (USB BOOT IMAGE)
#21

I ran software transcoding tests on my bare RPi5 with the Pi foundation's SC1148 active cooler.

While my RPi4B was unable to software transcode 1080i source content, and had limited success on 720p and 480i content, my RPi5 was able to transcode 1080i/720p/480i content at 1-8Mbit quality.

The 15 minute load for transcoding 1080i at 8Mbit is ~3.5 at <60C. A single 1-6Mbit stream is fully usable with the load dropping to about 1.3 for a 1MBit stream.

The RPi4 hardware transcoding has several problems that the RPi5 software transcoding solves.

Agreed with others on economic Intel Quick Sync Video hardware transcoding platforms.

My RPi5 fills my needs to reliably stream at 1-6Mbit through my 9Mbit uplink.

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#22

So I just recently got a Pi 5 and put OpenMediaVault on it with Channels DVR Linux version and two 12TB drives running on a USB dock. So far it can handle 4 recordings from my HDHomerun tuner and record a Philo stream plus playback to another PC all at the same time. I am very happy with it. I bought the 8GB CanaKit.

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#23

That's good to know, I have made a"spare" RPi 5 my "backup" channels recorder. I'm still using an iMac as the main recorder which works very well.

The backup 4GB RPi 5 has an Argon NEO 5 Case with a Kingston - NV2 M.2 PCIe 4.0 NVMe 2TB SSD. I run an rsync script twice a day to copy everything from the iMac Channels SSD to the RPi which only takes a few minutes. When the iMac is not in use, setting up the RP1 up takes about two minutes and works well.

When running comskip with two cores on the RP1 the Neo fan runs, but I don't hear it. The RPi temperature peaks at about 58C with the fan running

#24

I am currently running on a Raspberry Pi 4 -8. I was thinking about upgrading to a Pi5, but I can't justify the expense. I can buy a Windows 11 mini computer for $300 or less and I believe it is more powerful than the R5. But don't really know.

#25

Best to go with a PC .. PI's are overrated.

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#26

Pi’s make no sense anymore. Just get an n95 mini computer.

#27

Running Linux :grinning: