Raspberry Pi demos $25 PC running 1080p video, promises CD-quality audio

Yesterday saw Raspberry Pi attend the Transfer Summit in Oxford where foundation director Eben Upton gave a talk about the forthcoming $25 PC. Unfortunately, it wasn’t recorded due to problems with a corrupt SD card, but we’re hoping Raspberry Pi can get Eben to give the talk again on camera for us all to see.

What will be more interesting for anyone looking forward to buying a $25 PC this coming November, is seeing the alpha board in action. The video below does exactly that, showing the alpha development board hooked up to a keyboard (USB), mouse (USB), and a display (HDMI). On screen is the Quentin Tarantino film Inglorious Basterds playing.



The video is stored on the 2GB SD card plugged into the bottom of the board. It’s running at 1080p and uses H.264 video compression. Most importantly, it is running at full speed with audio playing even though we can’t hear it on the video due to a lack of speakers.

Raspberry Pi is also keen to point out that when the video you see below was recorded the board had been playing back the movie for 8 hours. So not only can the $25 PC handle 1080p video, it does so without any heat issues.



Other good news comes in the form of better audio output from the 3.5mm jack. Until now we thought it would only be FM quality, but some last minute tinkering by the hardware team has managed to get rid of the noise so we are now promised CD-quality sound. We can’t wait to hear it.

Update: Some readers are wondering how Inglorious Basterds in HD fits on a 2GB SD card. Well, it’s not the whole movie playing, it’s actually just the trailer on a loop. Hope that clears up any confusion. Also, the board does have HDMI audio too, not just from the 3.5mm jack.

Source: geek.com