Thursday, January 3, 2013

Creating Media Centre using Raspberry Pi - KODI(XBMC)


This page will describe how to make a XBMC Media Centre Box using Rapberry Pi to make your normal TV internet enabled. Once it is ready to use there will be only 3 cables attached - HDMI, NIC and Power cable.

Raspberry Pi

Size of this box is  - size of your credit card.
Height of this box is - almost size of a cigarette packet.

You may not be saving a lot while doing this yourself instead of buying a ready-made box for same purpose, but a lot of fun and creativity is guaranteed !

Pre-Requisite

A little creativity, a pinch of Linux knowledge, a spoon of time, few dollars bills, permission from your spouse to take control of your TV for few hours and skill to be happy like child !!

Bill Of Materials

Raspberry Pi Model-B - Credit Card size Arm PC board ( ~USD 50)
Case to house Raspberry Card ( ~USD 8)
A SD Card - Not a microSD ( 2 to 32 GB )
A HDMI cable
A mini usb power supply ( You can use your Blackberry or Samsung Galaxy power supply)
A RJ45 cable
A USB Keyboard and Mouse ( Used for initial setup )
MPEG-2 and/or VC-1 license key Read this and this
Time - 2 Hours
Internet - ( I am using 2Mbps)

Where To Buy Raspberry Pi?

Raspberry Pi box has just card. No cable. Check : element14.com or rs-online.com . Talk to vendor support to check availability and delivery time before placing online order.
In Singapore, I have purchased my Rapberry Pi with case for SGD 70 (inclusive GST) from Sim Lim Tower http://www.federalcomponent.com/


XBMC Images

You can download one of below Debian Linux based media centre distro images  and copy it on SD card. See more detail here . Download OS image. Write image on SD card using win32diskimager, dd, SDFormatte or any similar software.

OpenELEC : See Readme.txt
Xbian
Raspbmc

Add The Bricks  Together

- Connect all cables (Power, Network, HDMI, Mouse, keyboard)
- Insert SD card
- Power on TV and power on Raspberry Pi
- If you see XBMC screen on TV, treat yourself with a cope of coffee !

Remote

Soft Remote

You can use your smart phone to use as remote for your Media Centre. I have tested 'Official XBMC
Remote' - KORE on Android . It worked fantastic - 10/10!

  • you can send text from phone to xbmc e.g. a search text in your youtube
  • it emulate a physical remote - so common sense work quite well
  • there is back button to trace last operation, there is menu button to go home screen, there is info button to get information of a track/movie/file/youtube videa.

iOS and Android app can be downloaded from http://kodi.wiki/view/Official_XBMC_Remote

- 'Play to Kodi' Chrome browser plugin also work as remote and can send youtube video link to Kodi to play it independently

Note: Make sure you are entering correct IP of your XBMC box and Port of web server running on it. Default port displayed on soft remote is 8080 but Webserver default port running on XBMC/KODI is 80. So replace 8080 with 80 while configuring your remote.

Physical Remote

[1] My LG TV Remote worked fine with Xbian. It was working fine without any additional configuration. It used HDMI cable to pass control to Xbion.
[2] Also refer these articles : Article-1, Article-2,
[3] I am using wired mouse to instruct my media centre !

XBMC Add-On

http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Unofficial_add-on_repositories
http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Category:All_add-ons

 For Indian/Pakistani channels

 Others

  • It can recognize your NAS/SAS Drive having movies/videos as media source.
  • Stable Android OS is still not available for Raspberry Pi

Web Browser

I heard Opera is working on these 3 XBMC distro. Though I have not tested yet.

Credit

Thanks to Gaurav Swarup Sharma and his friend Sangeet Bhambri for pulling me in this work and sharing related information.

References

http://mymediaexperience.com/raspberry-pi-xbmc-with-raspbmc/
http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Raspberry_Pi


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