tv

In the past, I've booted LibreELEC on the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 in my "This is not a TV" Sharp NEC display.

According to LibreELEC's Pi 5 blog post, the new BCM2712 SoC decodes 4K and 1080p content just fine in H.264, and supports HEVC 4K60 hardware decoding.

And they've tested AV1, VC1, and VP9 at 1080p with no issue, though 4K in non-native formats does encounter frame dropping.

I wanted to put the Pi through some testing of my own, now that the Pi 5's been out for months, and LibreELEC version 12 is stable.

KSDK-TV broadcasts to well over 1 million households in the St. Louis metro area. And my Dad and I went to their broadcast tower last month to explore how the digital TV signal is delivered through the air to so many people.

On our tour, we explored over 75 years of television broadcast history, seeing how things transitioned from thousands of volts down to hundreds, and from analog audio and video to all-digital.

And we even found strange artifacts of the past, like this random microwave dish that received a signal through the roof of the broadcast building for a time:

The NEC UHD Professional Display M551 pictured here is not a TV—it's a display. And it's powered by a Raspberry Pi.

Specifically, it's powered by a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4, and that is done using Sharp NEC's new MPI4E carrier board: