The Raspberry Pi 5 has ruined my day
Reader, I must formally apologize. Despite reports in December 2022 of comments made in an interview with Raspberry Pi Foundation CEO Eben Upton, who subsequently claimed that there would be no Raspberry Pi 5 in 2023the sad truth is one of them is coming soon now.
I’ve disappointed you. I let myself down. In my defense, I am an embryo compared to everyone else I work with. I reached for the stars and the pride of youth said, βno.β My line manager responded in the same way, with scathing responses such as ‘lol at you’ and ‘so naive’. I deserve it all, and will make some time for self-care.
But I also feel like an idiot because about a month and a half ago I decided, from my own piggy bank, to get one Model B, especially because baby needs a Plex server.
This article, although consistently described as ‘profitable’ by my line manager and ‘good’ by one (1) email from a reader, was brought to you through experiences that broke my spirit and curiosity about technology, and the aftershocks still rumble on .
Wake up, a new, begrudgingly impressive microcomputer just dropped
Even now I’m frustrated by the relative lack of USB bandwidth NAS (network-attached-storage) purposes, and the quirks of Raspberry Pi OS (such as automatic disk mounting) compared to others Linux distributions like Ubuntu, which I’m starting to play around with as I, someone for whom math is definitely not a strong suit, try Learn Python for the 255th time. Maybe more about that soon.
Apart from that, there is one basic thing that annoys me: the board has no power button. I didn’t write about this in detail last time because I thought this was a first world problem: just something that I, a relative amoeba, had to deal with, as I believe all middle-aged whippersnappers call it .
Although I found it difficult. I usually use my Model B headless (i.e., ‘SSHing’ into the ‘command line’ from another ‘computer’), it can be annoying when you’re about to move the Pi somewhere else, or messing around with my external hard drivesand then realize it’s still on.
Then it’s a matter of either unplugging the power cable (‘badissimo’, as we say in the industry) or going back to the terminal and typing ‘sudo shutdown’. It might be cool to know these things, but it’s not cool to have to do them all the time, Dave. It’s soul-sucking.
But somewhere, up there in their ivory pastry shop, we were heard – because the Raspberry Pi now has one. This isn’t enough to get me a Pi 5 and a new case, but it’s nice.
There are a few other things that make me regret my mischievous impulsiveness. To quote a local reseller’s announcement email: “…a 2-3x increase in CPU performance over the Raspberry Pi 4”, and ‘a substantial improvement in graphics performance from the 800MHz’.
Oh okay. I wish I could just say, βgreat if it’s true,β but I’m famously βupset.β The Pi Model B, and, I assume, all Pis to date, are not great at transcoding video in Plex.
I don’t have any technical details for that. GPU accelerated hardware decoding appears to be possible on the Pi Model B, but I haven’t been able to get this working in Plex to my knowledge, so it could be a software issue. In that case I should just buy a NAS. All I know now is that anything that isn’t ‘Direct Playing’ in Plex (that is, doesn’t have to transcode it to play it with the Pi’s hardware) barely plays at all.
Faster SD speeds on the Pi 5 are also good (painful) to hear. I don’t use anything other than the card that came with my Model B starter kit, but if I wanted to turn mine into an emulation box, well, okay, I’d have to see how the Model B itself performs with reading and writing. write speeds in that context.
Recording me dropping my Raspberry Pi Model B out of a 42nd floor window and posting it to a social media website as an unsolicited offering to the sociopath who owns that website
Slowly but surely it dawns on me that I should have built my own NAS and bought an Nvidia Shield Pro, which is supposedly one of the best android boxes that they have now. This is a more expensive route, but it would also save me from acute heart failure. What exactly is money?
These aren’t the only reasons to upgrade to a Pi 5, and I’m afraid if you’ve made the mistake of cutting back on a Pi instead of a NAS for media center purposes, you might want to call it quits. I’ll keep an eye on the reviews and so on when the device is released in October 2023, but I think for now I’d get mail if I went back to the sweet darkness.
(To be fair to our boy, he got one thing right.)