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)

Converting media using Handbrake


Converting media is also sometimes known as transcoding. This is different from encoding, as encoding is considered to be the first conversion from the source format to the reproduced format (for example, from a film studio to Blu-ray Disc). All future conversions after this will thus be transcoded.

We'll use the popular and freely available Handbrake. This is because it works on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux, and is capable of delivering some impressive results with minimal effort.

Handbrake can be downloaded from http://handbrake.fr/downloads.php. I will not cover its installation here as it is not only fairly simple but also platform-specific.

After launching Handbrake, we are presented with an interface similar to the one that follows:

Let's see how to convert video files:

  1. First, select the Source tab and choose Video File.

  2. Find the video file you would like to convert and select it.

  3. Now, we should set the destination filename, profile level, and Container...