Rasberry Pi 4 with Rise Vision
Looks like the Rasberry Pi 4 will be a big step forward for digital signage: a much faster 1.5GHz quad-core 64-bit ARM Cortex-A72 CPU (apparently 3x faster than the 3B+), dual HMDI displays supporting 4k each, and a variety of other low-level improvements that make the whole platform more capable.
Details here: https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-4-on-sale-now-from-35/
Hopefully the faster CPU should help with video lag on the Pi, even if Chromium continues to drag its feet when it comes to hardware video decoding. For $35 USD (plus power supply, memory card etc) it looks like an awesome little machine.
However there are two notes in the release announcement which seem like they could create some work for people trying to port existing software:
- "To support Raspberry Pi 4, we are shipping a radically overhauled operating system, based on the forthcoming Debian 10 Buster release. This brings numerous behind-the-scenes technical improvements, along with an extensively modernized user interface, and updated applications including the Chromium 74 web browser."
- "For Raspberry Pi 4, we are retiring the legacy graphics driver stack used on previous models. Instead, we’re using the Mesa “V3D” driver developed by Eric Anholt at Broadcom over the last five years. This offers many benefits, including OpenGL-accelerated web browsing and desktop."
Does this likely mean the existing Rise Vision player won't install on the 4?
Any chance anyone at Rise Vision has gotten their hands on a 4 yet and given it a spin?
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Official comment
Hello Eric,
We do not expect there to be any major issues running Rise Player on Buster, but we will be doing more extensive testing in the coming weeks. Feel free to run Rise Player on your Raspberry Pi's running Buster. If you run into any issues please let us know. Once we have finished our testing we will update our documentation to show Buster as a supported operating system.
Pi 4s haven't been tested very extensively yet - mostly because they were pretty tough to get a hold of for a while! We're working to get them as thoroughly tested as possible before we officially support them. We'll be sure to update our docs and post an announcement once we're 100% positive that things are going to be reliable. :)
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For reference, here is what video looks like on Rise Vision on the Rasberry Pi 3B+ with the latest player (Installed July 20, 2019): https://photos.app.goo.gl/4qDp1ipRbDs9HgQm8
It's choppy, for sure. Dropping a lot of frames, sometimes not manging much more than 5fps or so by the looks of it.
The video file it's trying to play is 1280 x 720 h.264 at 2.8mbit/sec which I think is as low as you can reasonably go. The Rasberry Pi is of course perfectly capable of playing this file, actually, it can happily do much higher-res and higher-bitrate video, but only in applications that support GPU video decoding. Chromium doesn't, Rise Player is based on chromium, so it has to decode entirely in the CPU.
Hoping maybe the Pi 4 resolves this! It would be so great to be able to use the low-cost, very reliable Rasberry Pi platform for Signage on the Rise Vision platform. -
Good news! TLDR; Video is now decent on a Raspberry Pi 4 but things get hot quickly.
I've been running RiseVision on a 3B+ for about six months and it's worked fine for slideshows, pulling data from Google Sheets. Video at 1080p was unusable.
I got a new Pi4 yesterday (4GB, probably overkill). Installation worked fine just like on the 3B+.
Out of the box video at 1080p was a bit better but still too choppy for watching, and I could see a temperature sensor type icon on the right that was flashing on and off. So like Eric Ferguson said, Chromium is probably the problem.
Fortunately, Raspbian Buster has *some* hardware support in Chromium (1080p at 30fps) if you enable it (make sure you run update Raspbian first first as there was a bug prior to July 30 or so).
Steps to set it up:
Update Raspbian: "sudo apt update -y && sudo apt upgrade -y" then reboot and relaunch RiseVision.
End results: 1080p video worked fine on a 1080p screen. It was dropping some frames but I also had a temperature sensor alert as I floated around 80-85c during full screen play in RiseVision and it was throttling the CPU/GPU. I'm going to order a fan for my Pi and I'll also try reprocessing the video in a couple of sizes and formats and see how things go, but things look very promising.
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So I added a fan to the case, and since then I do not get any temperature warnings, I haven't checked the exact temp but can be sure it's consistently below 80C (research seems to indicate the with fan temps will float around 65C). Video playback with latest updates and no patches is very good at both 1080p and 720p. There is the occasional stutter of a dropped frame or two, but for our digital signage purposes it's good enough. We also put overlays with transparencies and the time on our video and it still works smoothly. Note that we don't use audio in our displays, so I can't say for sure that a Pi4 is what you want for your signage, but for us it's good enough (promoting merch and ski resorts in a retail location)
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That's great to hear!
I've now updated My Pi 3B+ to Buster and can confirm that Rise Vision runs perfectly but video is still unusable on it, even at low resolution and bitrates. Too bad because the hardware is of course totally capable of playing video, but I understand that Chormium hasn't implemented the GPU acceleration.So it's REALLY fantastic to hear that video is working in Rise Vision on the Raspberry Pi 4. This now means there's an excellent player option that will come in comfortably under $100 even decked out with a case, fast memory card, cables etc. Really great news.
I guess the next question will be: how does it handle dual monitors! -
I just setup a Raspberry Pi 4 display and tested with 1080 video and it works great. I'm going to do some testing with scrolling text this week and see if it scrolls smoothly because I remember the pi 3 struggled with that.
I'm interested in getting hdmi cec setup though and both my pi 3 and pi 4 say that its not supported even though the documentation says it should be supported. Maybe I need to have a licensed display to use that though.
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Michael,
That's correct, Display Control is only supported on Licensed Displays. My understanding is the Pi 3 natively supports CEC, but I do not if the 4 does. You can read more about that here: https://help.risevision.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005727826-Display-Control-Overview
Thanks!
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I too trialled a Raspberry Pi 4 1GB with video (HEVC and H.264) however it is was super choppy and would make RiseVision lock up and crash. See some video of the tests here:
4K YouTube video in Chromium
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBLVmLqHRCE
720p optimised video in RiseVision - however not stable
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrxjUVCb-E0
Scaled 720P video plus webpage - unusable
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pu6Tfjew__I
We are now testing it for our normal use (Pi4 2GB) showing full screen web page, PNG and a few text overlays. It would be great if/when smooth and reliable video playback is enabled as it means we can then ditch the full PCs we require for video displays.
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I have just completed another test. Raspberry Pi 4 2GB with the latest Pi Raspbian Image and updates. Latest RiseVision. This is showing a static image, 720p video file and text layered over an image. The Pi is running without a case and with a PoE hat (fan is on).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccCxwQXLyF4
This is looking better, however the odd hiccup with video every few plays. I am going to leave it running the rest of the week to see how its performance is running.
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Pitstop,
Just to confirm, the Pi has dual output capability, is that right? Are they both HDMI?
Also, have you followed the steps in this article to see if that gets it going to more than 1 Display: https://help.risevision.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003613806-How-can-I-setup-Rise-Player-to-use-multiple-displays-
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Unfortunately since we haven't started testing on the Pi4, I can't say for certain if it will work, but I'm hopeful once we begin testing on the Pi4, we can get this working as expected.
Thanks for letting us know that this is an issue you ran into so we can take it into our testing consideration in the future!
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Heads up, somewhere between Chromium 59 and 66 we started having problems with playlists that were pulling video and image slideshows, we haven't been able to figure out what caused the issue but taking out the video fixed the problem. We'll do more extensive testing when I get some new hardware later this week.
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It's good to hear that people are having success with video on the Pi 4! Even as mini X86 PCs and chromeboxes come down in price, this is still the most cost-effective player option on the market.
A few things would be helpful from devs/testers if anyone has their hands on some hardware in different variations:- Dual-screen support (The Pi4 has 2x HDMI outputs that nominally support simultaneous 4k displays)
- Better understanding of how different RAM options affect real-world performance. Important because 4GB version is around 60% more expensive than 1GB version.
- Better understanding of how important aftermarket heat sinks/fans are in achieving consistent performance and hardware lifetimes.
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Just implemented RiseVision on Raspberry Pi 4 4GB using the Raspberry Pi installation instructions.
I am installing 4 of these to replace AndroidTV display devices.
Why the 4GB version? I had the budget to purchase these.
I did install the included heat sinks and fan.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07XPHWPRB/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
(note I have no financial connection to Canakit)
Now that I have licensed display devices I will be playing around with additional capabilities.
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I am using the new Pi 4 4GB (because I had budget) and it's working very well. More snappy and can handle 720p video on a 1080p display ok. If I try 1080p video, or scaled video (or anything beyond a landscape display) it struggles. For our purposes however with basic websites and images, it's very stable and working well.
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