So I mentioned it was one of my pending tasks, to do while I’m confined here, at home, to help the Irish government to stop the quick spread of the coronavirus.

I’m happy that the situation in Ireland has stabilized, unlikely in Spain, where that historical lack of discipline and selfishness and super ego to believe Madrid the capital of the world, and so deciding not to close it for quarantine, will cause a lot of pain. I hope the closing of frontiers in Catalonia works.

Well, what I do you’re probably asking yourself, so I installed LibreELEC https://libreelec.tv/.

They have a very nice SD image writer for Linux, Mac and Windows, that will install the proper image on the micro-SD for your ARM device.

This Raspberry Pi 4 comes with Wifi integrated and a Gigabit Ethernet network port.

When I was in Barcelona, I had Kodi with Raspberry pi 2 and version 3.

This model v. 4 is much more cooler. I bought the 4GB version, and has 2xHDMI 4K.

So it is great to connect to any modern TV.

In Barcelona, I have Linux tower as NFS Server sharing my files with the Pi. Work good, even for the 100Mbit NIC of the version 3, but at that time I was only playing Full HD as the Pi didn’t supported greater resolution, and I only had that resolution on my displays too.

For now, I’m going to explore how is reading from a USB 3.0. Let’s see if it’s able to play smoothly.

The cool thing also is that I have SSH access, and so I can use the Pi for many more things. :)

I have my first update, I noticed that copying to that USB was not the best for me, as I tried to copy a .MKV file of 4.9GB and I encountered the limit of 4GB of FAT32. I could format the USB as ext4, but what I did is, SSH into the box, I see that I have two partitions on the SD for booting the Pi, the second one is a ext4 called storage. So I copied to the SD, through the network, using sftp the file I wanted.

The Gigabit connection was fast, but when the buffer fulled it started to show the real speed of the SD which is 15MB/s for writing.

Ext4 has no problem in holding a file 4.9GB so I’m watching my movie now. Will think about setting a NFS for the Pi as it will be very convenient. :)

I have an external, remote, keyboard logitech, but it happens that LibreELEC recognizes my Sony command, from the television. I don’t need the keyboard/mouse. Nice.

Here you can see my Raspberry Pi 4, connected to TV, in “combat mode”, naked, as PoC, before setting in its definitive place behind the TV.

Playing from the external USB 3.0 stick was also fluid, allowing 4K perfectly.

The only problem I has was when I was pushing movies to the USB through the network, and playing at the same time from the SD. It seems like the Raspberry reached its limits doing this and playing stuck frequently.