First off, I'd like to welcome you to this title. By the end of this book, you will be able to set up a comprehensive media center that will serve you well for years to come. Each chapter will guide you through the basics so that by the end of the book we will have gone from a basic system to a comprehensive and complex one that meets your needs.
In this chapter, we will cover the following:
Why Raspberry Pi is a good hardware choice to be used as a media center
The equipment needed to build a Raspberry Pi based media center
What Raspbmc is, and what it can do
Installing Raspbmc onto an SD card using Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux
Booting up Raspberry Pi to complete the installation