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)

Adding our SQL database to XBMC


By default, XBMC will use an internal SQLite-based database implementation. However, we would like to get XBMC to use our MySQL database instead. This is done by defining the database in advancedsettings.xml. We'll cover how to set up advancedsettings.xml for Raspbmc, but for other platforms, you should consult http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=HOW-TO:Sync_multiple_libraries/Setting_up_XBMC.

The best method for editing the settings file is via Secure Shell (SSH). SSH allows us to run commands on our Raspbmc installation as if we were typing them via a keyboard. The advantage of this is that we do not need to plug in a USB keyboard (which may not be available in spare) into the unit to edit the file.

  1. On Linux and OS X systems, all we need is to open a Terminal and run the following command (substituting the IP address of the Raspberry Pi itself):

  2. As you are connecting to the database for the first time, you are likely to see a message similar...