In this chapter, we will create a low-power home theater PC capable of playing a variety of local media files from a USB memory stick or hard drive as well as the content stored on your local network and cloud services, such as YouTube.

To do this, we will use the OpenELEC (http://openelec.tv) operating system, which is an operating system designed specifically for home theater PCs running on the Pi.

We will also create a custom enclosure for the media PC that will house a 20 column by 4 row (20 x 4) LCD, which can be used by XBMC to display information of the currently playing media or information related to the cursor position in the onscreen menu. We will also include a set of buttons that can be used to control XBMC without a USB keyboard or any other remote; both these and the LCD will be interfaced directly to the GPIO port on the Pi.