we've all heard of the raspberry pi it's
a single board computer
and about a well a little more than a
year ago they released the raspberry pi
4 and the raspberry pi 4 is kind of a
revolutionary
addition to um to the lineup because up
until the raspberry pi 4
raspberry pi was a great tinkering board
it was something that's a lot of fun for
makers and tinkerers
and and you know people that just want
to get their hands wet as far as setting
up a
single board computer i still have my
retro gaming on it hey there you go
retropie
does very very well yeah but with the
raspberry pi 4
of course it brought it into more of a
hey this is
almost as good as a you know entry level
desktop computer on a single board
computer
so with that set if you can use a single
board computer in place of a desktop
computer
what's next right so you could do that
and i wanna you know i wanna be brutally
honest with you i mean it's a single
board computer still through and through
absolutely but we're talking like it
might have four or eight gigs of ram
which is really good for a single board
computer makes for a decent
like office processor that's exactly
right yeah like if you're just using it
to
to get online do your facebook and do
your social media
phenomenal watch the occasional video
online it's good for that
too as long as you've got the right
setup but i think that's where people
get hung up with these
types of boards is that they're not
built for multimedia
or at least they're not well support
there's not a great deal of support for
multimedia
yet correct you talk about retro gaming
and retro gaming does really really well
because it's based on technology from 10
15 years ago that's right
so does very well on a raspberry pi but
it hasn't caught up to
things like like you're not going to get
really good performing
video although that said the raspberry
pi 4 does have some really incredible
specifications including
dual 4k 60p video output
micro hdmi granted right so you know
that's
i mean it even does well with photo
graphics like i've got on my
raspberry pi there you go
and it works great for that as long as
you don't exceed the amount of ram so a
raspberry pi the earlier gens that had
only one gig of ram
you may have trouble if you open a 30
gig
file right like you're not going to be
doing video editing in 4k
that's for sure but yeah doing some
jpeg work or something like that
why not absolutely so now the
natural evolution of that kind of
desktop idea taking a raspberry pi
single board computer and turning it
into a desktop computer
has evolved into what's called the
raspberry pi 400.
so it is a raspberry pi 4 at its heart
it's been you know they've rearranged
the board in order to make it fit within
this chassis
and you know it takes me back to
the kind of mid-80s
um i guess when i had a vic-20 which was
a keyboard
computer that's right and like that was
one of my first computers
and you know you think about the amiga
the commodores and
those things that we grew up with are
kind of
you know people have wanted that there
have been
projects where people can 3d print their
own raspberry pi
keyboard case and things like that but
now it's official
it's sleek it's incredible
it's a little bit um gimmicky in a way
but yeah if you look at that yeah i
think so
i think so we're going to kind of figure
that out together tonight
if you're into that like really sleek
form factor it is literally a keyboard
that is the computer
if you don't mind the fact that it's got
some cables coming out of it and
and you got to set a monitor up then
you're going to do just fine with this
but it's not like the raspberry pi that
you'll stick on the back of a tv and it
just operates
hidden away this is gonna be on your
desk
do you remember the desk in your garage
that you were turning into a computer i
remember that
this is like that but small this is a
lot sleeker
that doesn't so i had taken a big old
oak desk and uh
converted it into a full atx computer
yeah back in the day i was so jealous of
that desk that was pretty cool
when we used to do lan parties and stuff
unreal tournament
desk good times but let's get into the
box i want to take a look at this
and see what we have with the raspberry
pi 400.
first thing we're gonna see is
the raspberry pi 400 so that is a
raspberry pi 4
single board computer with four gigs of
ram
ready to go built in to the keyboard
it's just like the raspberry pi keyboard
now i've got the ansi edition so us
keyboard layout
let's take a look at the back here we've
got full size gpio
wow labeled with pins 1 and 40. we've
got microsd
dual hdmi output usbc for the power
dual usb 3 and a usb 2
and ethernet gigabit and a kensington
lock
so and yes that and that is uh gigabit
ethernet
yeah you need a kensington lock on your
raspberry pi come on
just another cable to have uh all right
it also this is the kit of course
so it comes with some extra things to
get you up and going
comes with the official raspberry pi
mouse there it is that's cool
yeah i mean it looks like a pretty
generic cheap mouse
i wish i wish it was wireless to be
honest with you i think that would have
been a
lot better for them to do that but hey i
agree it came with it
we got the power supply usbc
and that of course is 5.1 volts
3 amps and that's going to power this
bad boy
we've got a sd card to microsd adapter
i guess the sd card yeah that it's
actually in the raspberry pi 400
okay so presumably that is ready to boot
further in the box ah we've got a micro
hdmi to hdmi cable i love that so we
don't have a bunch of dongles and
adapters hanging out the back of it it
is just a nice little sleek
cable and it came with this beginner's
guide as well which is you know
15 book right there uh
included which has got tons of projects
for the kids if you want to get into
some stem
stuff some fun projects to get you up
and going and
and doing some maker tech um this
is a a pretty incredible addition really
i mean you'd
typically want to buy that separately so
nice that it came with it anyways
yeah there you go so love the keyboard
layout it does not feel like a
a bad keyboard at all i mean if they're
pretty low profile keys
you're not like looking at a mechanical
keyboard it's more like a
kind of like a laptop keyboard or
something like that yeah they're not
clunky which is nice
yeah the cooling on the bottom there is
uh
quite significant uh there's a really
large heat sink in there that's keeping
the thing cool so they've overclocked it
to 1.8 gigahertz out of the box
oh cool which is lovely and as you can
see
just sleek form factor
so it's even smaller than my vic-20 but
it's super
super powerful it's
not it's not that thick either which is
no that's what i mean like sleek
form factor just great i would have
thought
because i mean you used to the raspberry
pi you know it sits up that high i
thought it was going to be a much bigger
keyboard but
no they've really they've really just
shrunk it down that's nice
yeah yeah um just like a raspberry pi 4
you've got bluetooth 5 you've got your
wi-fi gigabit ethernet i'm going to be
using it on wi-fi today
and it just fires right up and ready to
go so should we do that
absolutely let's fire it up
well here we are raspberry pi os came
pre-installed
at first boot i had to just kind of go
through the initial setup
process which just got its updates and
things like that
i'm going to connect to my you know i
can connect to wi-fi wi-fi is working
out of the box
everything just kind of works just like
a raspberry pi what does it come with
i mean you've got everything that comes
on a raspberry pi os
games noise
minecraft pie boing bunner
so what's the performance like oh there
we go
oh that was quick oh oh
that was quick yeah you are not good at
that
not very good at that um that's okay so
i mean performance wise
it's a raspberry pi 4. it performs
really great it's uh
it's all running from this little
keyboard so what do i have i've got the
mouse cable i've got power and i've got
hdmi output going to the tv
and that's all there is to it so the sd
card that came in it
again came pre-installed with this
operating system ready to go overclocked
to 1.8 gigahertz
i would rather have seen them put in
better sd cards
truthfully um so i actually i grabbed
myself a kingston
endurance card i think because raspberry
pies are known to eat
microsd cards for dinner i want
something that's going to be a little
more you know long life better for this
kind of thing
so i'm going to shut this down because
i'm probably not going to want to
personally run raspberry pi os on here
i want to run ubuntu because now ubuntu
is officially supported
on the raspberry pi 4 this being a
raspberry pi 4
at its heart it should run pretty well
we got four gigs of ram
and uh i've already pre-installed ubuntu
12.10 from ubuntu.com it's now
officially
downloadable as an image file from their
website if you click on downloads you're
going to see under
iot raspberry pi is the first in the
list
so we're going to shut her down take a
quick break when we come back we'll be
booted into ubuntu
20.10 stick around
[Music]
welcome back so we are booted into
ubuntu 20.10 on the raspberry pi 400.
so this keyboard is all that i need in
order to be up and running with a full
computer
and here we go out of the box it's got
firefox
and let's bring it up i have you know
i've tested a few things just to see
how things work i've connected it to the
tv at home just to see
you know are the videos going to work
and things like that let's make sure
that
i have internet because i should
have yeah i've already got i've already
set up my wi-fi which is
configurable just like on ubuntu you
just go to your wi-fi settings here and
select your network
and there you go enter your password and
you're in
let's jump onto youtube because i mean
the the question that always comes up is
immediately how does it handle
multimedia we know
that it's got your office suite we've
got libreoffice
writer libreoffice the suite already
pre-installed with ubuntu so if i click
on that
there we go libreoffice writer just like
you would expect so
i mean that's never a question is office
going to work yeah
it's going to work out of the box but
what about things like youtube so
let's go to linuxtechshow.com which is
going to reroute to our linux tech show
channel on youtube make sure you give us
a subscribe
and here we go let's click on becca's
news from last week
and everything seems to load pretty well
the ads work
so that's good now i'm monetizing this
so this is fantastic
video will play after ad this is great
tv so if you got an ad
while you're watching this and now
you're watching me watch an ad
we basically just doubled our
monetization this week so that's been
fantastic okay so there's becca in a
youtube video
let's bring it up full screen and see
how that performs because that's
usually problematic on these kinds of
setups but as you can see out of the box
in firefox
it's working fantastic frame rate
seems okay um
i mean i i don't know how to gauge that
beyond what i see
and it looks fine yeah
so youtube works the other thing that i
wanted to know is
was plex going to work so
and i don't know if i'm going to have
access to it from here because as i
mentioned
i was able to access it from my home
tv and i'll just say out of the box
plex did not work so it said that there
was some kind of error or something
missing and i got into some forums and i
and i started looking through and
somebody suggested
oh just install the vlc package and i'm
like
just like everyone else in the thread
they're how does that
impact plex because vlc is a video
player but it has nothing
at all to do with plex well it turns out
so i just did an apt
install plex or pardon me vlc
and having installed vlc it brought in
all these codecs and everything else
that come with vlc
and plex worked at that point so
everything worked absolutely flawlessly
so now we're able to watch things
and in fact i was able to decode h.265
video on plex oh nice
which was fantastic because even my my
computer that's connected to the tv at
home
has a great deal of trouble with h.265
h.265 is very resource intensive i
prefer to keep my media at h.264 so just
keep in mind
if you're looking for the best
performance on this you're probably
going to want to stick with h.264
but it did play h.265
i'd probably go with ethernet though
because as you know
wi-fi with h.265 is probably going to
have some hiccups
that works great the one thing that i
have not yet got to work jeff and and
community
is netflix because the version of
firefox that comes with this
does not support drm on
and netflix requires that so there are
packages and you get into the forums on
the raspberry pi
because remember this is a raspberry pi
4 right so lots of people have already
put work into it and there
are installers which i haven't tried yet
but
the forum threads say that hey you can
install this
script and it will it will get you up
and running with a version of chrome
that is
built for drm so then you can use things
like netflix which require that so
everything works pretty good out of the
box
pretty nice right yeah um so
as far as i'm concerned you know is this
a gaming system no is this a
multimedia system no not really um
but i'll say we use um an android box
at home for our tv and i disconnected
that and plugged this in in its place
and this was performing better than our
one-year-old
oh really box yeah so for multimedia
even it was doing a better job than the
android box and i think
that the the family can really
appreciate it a little more because
uh the form like the kind of the the way
that it
the i guess the desktop paradigm is more
like a computer than an android tv
so you're actually using an interface
that where you're bringing up a browser
and you're
able to install applications and linux
software and things like that so
it is a really robust system works great
um
i mean that's that's really all there is
to it right like does it work
yeah it is a raspberry pi 4 though so if
i was going to use this as a set top box
i would just go with a raspberry pi 4
right overclock it to 1.8 gigahertz to
match the speed of this um
and and that's not really a selling
point remember that overclocking can be
done anyways so
whether you have a raspberry pi 4 at 1.5
gigahertz
or a raspberry pi 400 at 1.8
it looks like a selling feature on paper
but it's just a setting in the operating
system so
you can take that raspberry pi 4 and
bump it up to 1.8 as well so
pretty clever marketing i must say
because those who don't understand
how overclocking works will think this
is faster well it's not
it's the exact same soc so
all right let's jump back over so i mean
all in all i'm pretty impressed with it
i like it as i mentioned it's a little
bit on the gimmicky side but i'm
old school and i like that kind of a
gimmick well and i mean for
for me like i'm looking at that and i'm
going that would make
especially with this you know manual
yeah
that would make a great christmas gift
for the kids because like our
especially with you know one of my boys
who really wants to get into programming
savannah's been doing that for a couple
years going back to that uh the ciggy
that she had
uh from smart girls yeah this is a robot
yeah um
so i mean something like that that would
be cool you know buy them a monitor and
a
you know the raspberry pi just connect
it to the tv well yeah you can do that
and that's the nice thing too is that
because of the form factor you can just
disconnect it and put it away when
you're not using it
pull it out put it on the on the tv
whatever you want to do yeah so yeah i
think it's
it's definitely got its place yes um is
it for you
that's really you know it's a
case-by-case thing so uh
but i've taken a look at it i like it um
i think it's
it's actually making a really nice kiosk
here at the studio i think
we may just keep it set up um pretty
fantastic so check it out is the
raspberry pi 400 i'll post links below
for you
and uh follow those um and i'll uh
that will probably kick back a little
bit to help the show but
otherwise just you know grab yourself
one in time for christmas if you think
it'd make a great gift
a reminder that you can support us on
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have a great week everybody see ya
[Music]
bye
[Music]
you