Advertisement Cueing up some videos to enjoy on my Raspberry Pi yesterday, I made a startling discovery – it wouldn’t play MPEG videos! Has this happened to you? Are you running a Four weeks on and I’ve been playing with my Raspberry Pi in various ways, from using it to browse the web and standard day-to-day computing tasks to playing around with the various configurations that are. On your Raspberry Pi computer, or enjoy viewing videos through the desktop?

Have you noticed that certain video files cannot be played back? If so, you’re not alone. Many people have run into trouble with the fact that while the Raspberry Pi will happily transcode high definition videos, it seemingly cannot playback MPEG-2 videos. The reason for this is not a hardware failure or even a software failure, however – rather, it is all down to licencing. Many media players on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux distributions will allow you to enjoy MPEG-2 without any licencing issues, though – so what is going on? What makes the Raspberry Pi so different that it requires a licence to playback MPEG-2 videos, and how exactly does this license work?

MPEG-2 Licencing & The Raspberry Pi Other operating systems include the cost of the various codecs within the price of the operating system. In the case of Linux distributions, free versions of media encoders and decoders are used instead. But hang on – the Raspberry Pi runs a Linux distribution, so why isn’t the MPEG-2 codec free? The answer is simple. The Raspberry Pi is designed to be used for education, and while there are many who enjoy its multimedia capabilities, the developers decided to remove MPEG-2 in order to keep costs down.

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If you want to use MPEG-2, it is there for you to unlock for a small fee. Camillo Sitte The Art Of Building Cities Pdf To Word. Of course, you might not want to; after all, there are I’ve recently received my Raspberry Pi after a long wait – and I’ve got quite a few plans for it.

The problem is, I’m not totally sure which project I want to attempt first. Beyond playing back videos. How To Get The MPEG-2 Licence In order to install the MPEG-2 licence on your Raspberry Pi, you will first need to find out your device’s serial number. This can be found in the documentation that you included when you first received the computer, but if you don’t have this to hand, don’t worry, you can interrogate the motherboard. Installing The MPEG-2 Licence On Your Raspberry Pi With the order made, you will need to wait up to 72 hours for your licence to be received by email (if it doesn’t arrive, you should email the Raspberry Pi people, but the process is usually reliable and efficient). When the licence key arrives you will find it in a text file as a single line, something similar to: decode_MPEG2=0x1234567 In order to use this on your Pi, you will need to edit the config.txt file, which can be found in /boot.

Simply add the licence as a new line of text as shown above, then save and close. If you have multiple SD cards for different OS versions – perhaps one for As befits a man with too much tech on his hands, I’ve been playing with my Raspberry Pi recently, configuring the device so that it works to its fullest potential. It continues to run as. Crossfading In Vlc Media Player. And one for RaspBMC – you will need to add the licence to each. Reboot your Raspberry Pi to complete the procedure, and you will then be able to enjoy MPEG-2 videos. Could I Try a Hacked Codec?

There are – apparently – hacked versions of the codec available online, but really when you consider what might be necessary (for instance, running software to spoof the device serial number) and the fact that the licence is so cheap, this really isn’t worth it.

Even modern fast CPUs struggle to decode HD video in real time, so modern graphics cards have the ability to do it instead. Graphics processors, or GPUs, have many times more cores than CPUs, but they're a lot simpler.

This means they're better suited to drawing video or 3d scenes, where it's usually possible to divide the picture up into pieces that can be processed in parallel. The RPI has a really slow processor, so is even less capable of decoding video itself, known as 'software rendering'. Luckily, because its chip is intended for video oriented set top boxes, it contains a decent GPU that is capable of decoding HD video in the three main video formats used today.

However, as rcxdude mentioned, those decoding algorithms are not free, and is controlled with a license key. Vlc has no access to this video decoding hardware if it's locked, so must use the CPU.

That's painfully inadequate on the pi. To expand on the price point: The Raspberry Pi foundation could have opted for a volume license for all Raspberry Pi devices to be licensed from the get go. However while this is fine for Microsoft and the like, it would have gone easily into the multi-thousand-pound range as all they can give is estimated sales and that would have pushed up prices of the unit itself.

Considering how cheap it is for individual licenses and the very tinkerer nature of RPi itself, it made more sense to ask users to purchase single device licenses, install them manually and probably save everyone some money overall. To expand on the 'what is it' point: What you're buying is a license key that the codec itself requires be present before accepting or working on any audio or video stream sent to it.

I believe the codec is part of most distros as it's just a few Kb, but without licensing it's essentially useless.