The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer board, designed to inspire a new generation of computer users to become interested in programming. However, this single-board computer also has lots of potential to be used in different areas.
The video capabilities of the Raspberry Pi have led to interest in the device being used as a home media centre. This interest has been generated because the Pi’s VideoCore IV GPU offers Open GL ES 2.0, hardware-accelerated OpenVG, and 1080p30 H.264 high-profile decoding. The GPU is capable of 1Gpixel/s, 1.5Gtexel/s or 24GFLOPs with texture filtering and DMA infrastructure.
The fact that omxplayer is the only external video player that uses the Raspberry Pi’s GPU hardware acceleration makes it indispensable. This is because the low powered Broadcom CPU on the Raspberry Pi simply cannot cope with playing video files.