Anime and Raspberries

On the great quest for watching anime nicely, the raspberry pi could be a major part, but just don't watch anime on it. It's actually quite the simple story as to how this opinion came about. At the very beginning, omxplayer couldn't handle internal subs, otherwise known and pretty much universally used in the anime community as softsubs inside of the mkv container format. Much time has passed since then, and for the most part, softsubs now work with omxplayer as well as custom fonts that might be included. Thus currently, you could watch anime with some semblance of decency on the raspberry pi and if you normally stream and decided to swap to viewing anime locally, then there is probably even going to be an improvement in the quality.

The real issue with the raspberry pi isn't that it can't play the videos, but it just seems to be lacking the power needed to deal with the anime encodes of the modern....era... While perfectly watchable, there is some occasional blocking artifacts that seem to appear (in the same locations in the video for me). With the handful of videos that I tried, there weren't any major issues or artifacts on a large portion of the screen, but since we are watching stuff locally, why settle for watchable when you can watch it on another device that isn't so resource limited.

Unfortunately there really isn't a solution since omxplayer is pretty much the only video player available and optimized for the raspberry pi. XBMC also uses omxplayer on the raspberry pi and of course it works just about as well as it should, but apparently it's just not enough for that perfect anime viewing experience.

So in the end, it's probably better to stick to XBMC for movies, maybe older anime (dvix days?), and "normal" stuff, or the better option of using it as a media aggregator/server rather than a media player. This is where I laugh because I have never gotten to the actual bit about a media aggregator/server thus I'm just saying that you could do it that way with zero backup. Eventually I will get there I guess...