Book Image

Raspberry Pi Media Center

By : Sam Nazarko
Book Image

Raspberry Pi Media Center

By: Sam Nazarko

Overview of this book

<p>Low-cost and high-performing, with a massively diverse range of uses and applications, the Raspberry Pi is set to revolutionize the way we think about computing and programming. Using it as a Media Center allows everyone to have a low-cost device that is always on, attached to their TV. <br /><br />Imagine controlling your TV with your smartphone, dynamically streaming content that you have on various devices across your home, as and when you want. Raspberry Pi Media Center will show you how to configure the complete experience using readily available and accessible tools, so that you too will soon be enjoying your media from the comfort of your own sofa. <br /><br />With this practical guide, you’ll discover how you can transform your Raspberry Pi into a powerful media center. Using Raspbmc (based on the XBMC distribution), you'll be shown how you can deploy and configure your own media center, including coverage of all the essentials from controlling your device with a TV remote or smartphone, to the creation and customization of your very own media library (including the conversion of any existing collection). You'll even be able to stream multimedia from your devices or directly from the Internet!</p>
Table of Contents (17 chapters)

Sources


It's now time to get XBMC to use our content, which can be done from a variety of locations and protocols.

Adding sources in XBMC

Adding sources allows XBMC to access the locations we add and play content from them.

The following steps show how you can add a source in XBMC:

  1. From the main menu, open the relevant section based on the type of source we are adding. For example, if we are adding a video source, we should select Videos.

  2. Now, select the files.

  3. If you are planning on using a USB device, you will see that they are already shown; however, the device can be defined as a source as well. The advantages of this are as follows:

    • When using Library Mode, something that we will explore in Chapter 4, Streaming from a Computer, you may have different types of content on the drive—such as TV shows and movies—in different folders. Setting the content type can only be done at the drive level if this is treated as a source.

    • Pin-code locking is unavailable.

    • Setting content types this way may not...