Month: March 2013

Enabling MPEG2 and VC-1 decoding in Raspberry Pi XBMC

If you have tried to play on your Raspberry Pi XBMC mpeg2 content like DVB-T or DVB-T2 stored *.ts content, you might have noticed that only audio is played but not video. For this you will have to purchase licenses and install them.

You can start from Raspberry Pi Store. You will have to ssh to you Raspberry Pi and run following and pick the Serial.

root ~ # cat /proc/cpuinfo
Processor       : ARMv6-compatible processor rev 7 (v6l)
BogoMIPS        : 697.95
Features        : swp half thumb fastmult vfp edsp java tls
CPU implementer : 0x41
CPU architecture: 7
CPU variant     : 0x0
CPU part        : 0xb76
CPU revision    : 7

Hardware        : BCM2708
Revision        : 000e
Serial          : 0000000048421123
root ~ #

I’m doing this for several devices + also VC-1 codecs at the same time. Once you have all the serials needed, just add the serials to and purchase the licenses.
I didn’t found out other than paypal as payment. You will receive some email with instructions. Once you get the actual keys you just add following lines to config.txt. First one is for MPEG2 and second one for VC-1.

decode_MPG2=0x12345678
decode_WVC1=0x12345678

And that should be it.

Deleting partitions from SD card with Windows

If you play around with SD cards, eg. with Berryboot or similar for RaspberryPi, you might end up having many partitions in a SD card. If you need to use them in some other way, you might find it difficult to get rid of the partitons. You might be able to delete everything, but might also notice that some partions are hard to delete or remove.

Disk_Management

You might end up showing like this but you can’t Delete Volume. There is an easy way to get rid of that though with the standard windows tools.

Invoke cmd prompt
# Run diskpart with admin rights
diskpart
# type list disk to show the disk what you have (your sd must be detected and inserted)
DISKPART> list disk

Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt
——– ————- ——- ——- — —
Disk 0 Online 298 GB 0 B
Disk 1 Online 1920 MB 0 B

# you might see something different, but select the correct SD card disk as mine is Disk 1
DISKPART> select disk 1

Disk 1 is now the selected disk.

# then list partitions that you have, they might be more or different size, mine was this small berryboot partition
DISKPART> list partition

Partition ### Type Size Offset
————- —————- ——- ——-
Partition 1 Primary 70 MB 2048 KB

# then select the correct partition
DISKPART> select partition 1

Partition 1 is now the selected partition.

# and after that delete it
DISKPART> delete partition

DiskPart successfully deleted the selected partition.

# now you can exit from diskpart and see that the partition is deleted
DISKPART>exit

Disk_Management_2

That was the easyest way I could quickly figure how to get rid of those partitions, hopefully this helps someone.