Question 4.1: Making a Media Center You want to convert your Raspberry Pi ......

A Raspberry Pi actually makes a pretty good media center. Figure 4-1 shows one running XBMC (Xbox Music Center).

Raspberry Pi is perfectly capable of playing full HD video as well as streamed music, MP3 files, and Internet radio.

XBMC is an open source project that was originally developed to convert Xbox game consoles into media centers. The code has since been ported to many platforms including the Raspberry Pi.

Converting your Raspberry Pi to a media center is a matter of creating a new SD card that has a distribution including XBMC. We will use Raspbmc.

1. Download the disk image onto your computer.

To create an SD card with the Raspbmc distribution on it, you need access to a PC (Windows, Mac, or Linux) with an SD card writer.

Download the image file for Raspbmc from http://www.raspbmc.com/download.

Scroll down the web page until you get to the section “Just want an image without a fancy installer?” and download the file labeled Standalone Image.

2. Copy the image file onto an SD card.

To create an SD card with the Raspbmc image file, follow exactly the process described in Recipe 1.6. You should use an SD card of at least 4 GB.

3. Put the SD card into the Raspberry Pi and start it up.

You may need to answer a few configuration questions during the first boot, and then you are on your way.

Discussion

XBMC is a powerful piece of software with many features. Perhaps the simplest way to check that it is working is to put some music and/or video files onto a USB flash drive or external USB hard disk and connect it to the Raspberry Pi. You should be able to play them from XBMC.

Since the Raspberry Pi is likely to be sitting near your TV, you may find that your TV has a USB port that can provide sufficient current to run the Raspberry Pi so that you don’t need a separate power supply.

A wireless keyboard and mouse are a good idea, since if you buy them as a pair, they will use a single USB port for the dongle and avoid wires trailing all over the place. You can also buy mini-keyboards with built-in trackpads that are useful in this situation.

A wired network connection is generally higher performance and better than a WiFi connection, but it is not always convenient to have the Pi near an Ethernet socket. If this is the case, then you can set up XBMC to use a WiFi dongle for a network connection.

Setting up WiFi when using XBMC and Raspbmc is easier than under Raspbian or Occidentalis (Recipe 2.5) since you can use the slick user interface provided by the media center software. To set up your wireless network, go to the Programs section of XBMC and then choose Raspbmc Settings (Figure 4-2).

Select the WiFi option and then enter your SSID (WiFi network name) and WiFi password.

See Also

The XBMC software has a user manual in the form of a wiki.

Raspbmc is not the only media center distribution. Two other popular distributions are:

• OpenElec

• XBian

You can add an IR remote to Raspberry Pi to control XBMC.