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Saturday, August 2, 2014

Raspberry PI: XBMC Home Media Player - Building the OpenELEC Linux Distribution

Published on Feb 21, 2013
In this video series I am going to explain how you can build a XBMC (xbmc.org) Media Player for a home television using the OpenELEC Linux distribution and deploy this on the Raspberry PI platform. This video starts from the very first steps and is aimed to be an introductory guide for those who are not used to compiling and building software under Linux.
Warning - Please make sure you have at least 15GB free on your building system and be warned that the compile could take up to 10-12 hours (or more) depending on the performance of your machine and the speed of your download link.
The Raspberry PI is a very low cost and small single-board computer developed in the UK by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. It is a powerful device and additionally it has hardware accelerated support for MPG4 and MPG2 decoding, making it a perfect choice for a home media centre.
The second video in this series demonstrates how we can add infra red (IR) remote control functionality to the setup using a cheap IR receiver that is connected directly to the GPIO pins of the Raspberry PI.
This video is not as education focused as other videos that I have presented; however, it does allow us to build a platform on which I can demonstrate how we can integrate electronics devices in the home; in fact, a smart television is the perfect point to act as an information hub for the built environment... and to do this, we may need to integrate sensor inputs from all over a house together and provide aggregated intelligent analysis of that information to the householder.

Raspberry PI