piCorePlayer 1.00

piCorePlayer 1.0 is ready and you can get it from the download page.

High resolution audio through HDMI

• Thanks to the suggestion from giantpopples from the Squeezbox forum and the work by tghewett from the Raspberry Pi forum it is now possible to stream high resolution audio through the HDMI cable. Before the Raspberry Pi would down-sample everything to 48kHZ. But we modified the bcm2835-pcm.c and build the kernel. Now it is possible to stream 88.1kHZ and 96kHZ through HDMI. It might be possible even to use up to 192kHZ, but I have not received any report on this.

Original

.formats = SNDRV_PCM_FMTBIT_U8 | SNDRV_PCM_FMTBIT_S16_LE,
.rates = SNDRV_PCM_RATE_CONTINUOUS | SNDRV_PCM_RATE_8000_48000,
.rate_min = 8000,
.rate_max = 48000,
.channels_min = 1,
.channels_max = 2,

Changed to

.formats = SNDRV_PCM_FMTBIT_U8 | SNDRV_PCM_FMTBIT_S16_LE | SNDRV_PCM_FMTBIT_S32_LE,
.rates = SNDRV_PCM_RATE_CONTINUOUS | SNDRV_PCM_RATE_8000_192000,
.rate_min = 8000,
.rate_max = 192000,
.channels_min = 1,
.channels_max = 2,

Kernel

• Kernel updated to 3.8.13+ which is the special fiq_split version gsh is working on where the USB problems in the RPi is in focus.

Reduced size

• Once again back in small size 28 MB in all.

Mild overclocking

arm_freq=800
core_freq=333
sdram_freq=450
force_turbo=1

Other tweaks in the config.txt, cmdline.txt and /etc/modprobe.conf file.

Get maximal RAM for the processor added in config.txt

gpu_mem=16

Slow down wired LAN performance

Help with wireless and reduce the frequency of the debug messages and fixes some USB DAC audio problems (Musical Fidelity V-DAC II and Hifimedia Sabre DAC).

smsc95xx.turbo_mode=n in the cmdline.txt

Fixes audio problems for some USB DACs

/etc/modprobe.conf file added:

options snd_usb_audio nrpacks=1

As usual - please report your findings, so that we can continue improving the piCorePlayer.

The pCP Team
Paul, Greg, Ralphy and Steen