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)

Supported backends


A backend is a source that XBMC can play content from.

Overview

Raspbmc supports playback of both music and video content from the following source types (this does not cover all of them):

  • USB drives

  • SD card content

  • HTTP: Playing back content over a standard web protocol

  • FTP

  • SMB: Windows and Linux shares

  • NFS: The network filesystem, typically used in Unix

  • AFP: Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) is typically used for sharing content across the network from Mac OS X systems

  • UPnP/DLNA: Allows streaming from capable sources, such as UPNP streaming software on laptops

  • AirPlay: This entails enabling the option Allow XBMC to receive AirPlay content by navigating to System | Settings | Network

    Note

    We won't touch on how to configure network shares such as SMB or NFS as the set up is very much dependent on your operating systems and its configuration. You may wish to consult your operating system's documentation for details on how to configure a network share.

USB drives

We'll only look at setting up...