Beginning of draft post for RPI media player experiment

content/post/projects/rpi-media-box.md

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+author = "Doug Smith"
+title = "Raspberry Pi as a Media Player"
+date = "2023-11-11"
+description = "Squeezing enoug power out of an rpi to play media"
+toc = true
+draft = true
+
+categories = [
+  "Projects"
+]
+tags = [
+  "Raspberry Pi"
+]
++++
+
+# Intro: My somewhat petty motivations
+
+In the 2020s is a funny decade for the cable box. Like, streaming has given us
+access to so much media on the computer that a lot of people give up on that
+special converter strapped to the TV. So many people in fact that we have a
+phrase for it: "cord-cutting". Meanwhile, the computing power of everything
+else attached to your TV, from game consoles to DVD players to even the TV
+itself, is massively increasing their computational power. This is usually
+to support a variety of internet powered content-delivery features, be it
+the aforementioned streaming or some wacky reimagining of smartphone apps,
+and the result has broadly been an increase in entertainment options for the
+consumer. And I think I don't like it.
+
+Like, all those internet-enabled devices were being critiqued for enforcing
+planned obsolescence and experience-ruining DRM before we knew that people
+could use them to spy on you. And the UX isn't great. Like, you used to just
+hit buttons to configure your TV, which passed through all the images from the
+things you plugged into it, which you configured seperately, with or without
+the image it displayed on the TV, but now those lines are all blurry. Like, do
+you watch Netflix on the TV or through the Xbox connected to your TV? Because 
+the controls and performance can be very different, as will the level of ads
+thrown at you during a watching session.
+
+Like most device problems, my first instinct to solve it is to throw everything
+away and see what can be done with FOSS. The goal is to make a single media box
+that collects as much of my media experiences as possible so I can control/configure
+them. It's hard to dispense with the Smart TV entirely 
+(they don't really make a lot of "dumb" TVs, especially not at the 
+higher tier of quality), but if all I'm using is one HDMI port I'm hoping I won't
+notice.
+
+# Step 0: Getting an Rpi running
+
+So before building anything, you need to make sure you have a working Raspberry
+Pi. There are a lot of tutorials out the for RPi setup, basically you just get
+your device, flash the appropriate verion of the Raspbian OS to an SD card,
+plug the card into your Pi, and connect a power source. Pretty straightforward,
+I can even verify that this will work as a media player by loading youtube on a
+browser and playing a video...
+
+And if you're in a similar situation to me, this is the first hurdle. The video
+experience for me chugged horribly an the OS threw alerts about "insufficient power
+to CPU".
+
+## Verifying Your Power Source
+
+So as it turns out, the Pi3 isnt actually powered by a MicroUSB. Well, it is, the
+power port fits a MicroUSB connector ad not much else, my old MicroUSB phone
+charger turned the thing on, but it only sort of works, because the Pi demands
+more power than a MicroUSB should be able to supply. Per the standard, a MicroUSB
+connector can handle 2 Amperes at 5 volts, and the Pi3 needs all of it to drive
+its CPU. The problem is, a lot of MicroUSB cables that are for charging other
+devices or doing data transfer aren't capable of delivering at that standard,
+you need to identify a good power supply out of a field of false promises.
+
+How do know if you have a good cable? Well, if you own a multimeter you can
+actually test this yourself. Just configure a meter to the 2A/5V range
+expected, arrange the MicroUSB port you want to test so it's facing you,
+and touch the live (red) probe to the further left pin while touching the
+ground (black) probe anywhere on the outside of the port. The multimeter will
+read the voltage the port delivers, which is the power supply you Pi has to
+work with. If you're not seeing 5V (I found a lot of my device chargers 
+delivered 1.5V, which I guess could be a different standard for data-delivering
+cables?), or having trouble getting a reader (the pins can be recessed on 
+some ports that make readings hard to get), you can just get a new cable
+certified to deiliver power to the MicroUSB max for about $10. I've found
+CanaKit works fine.
+
+
+# Step 1: Running a media player
+
+Now we've got our power source, we're running the CPU at its full power
+level, and we can try and load that video... and it still chugs. Maybe its
+just the network? Nope, VLC runs a file slowly as well. It's important to
+remember that this isn't a particularly powerful computer by modern PC
+standards. Just running the stuff you would use on your Linux PC is probably
+not going to work when the task is as intensive as audio/video. We need to
+optimize for the compute we have.