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One of the things I wanted to try on the Raspberry Pi was XMBC and there are a couple of projects looking at getting the media application on to the £29 board, it’s early days yet but there are plenty of resources out there if you want to give it a go. I used OpenELEC to XBMC on to the Pi and there are a couple of ways of getting it working. You can do it the hard way and download the source files and compile them yourself, there are full instructions on openelec.tv. Or you can do it the easy way and find a pre-built image for the Pi and that is exactly what I did.

I found the image file on the Raspberry Pi forums so I downloaded the image and used Win32diskimager to copy over the image file. The first time I did it I copied over the wrong image and then Windows couldn’t see the SD card and so I couldn’t put on a new image, it wouldn’t even format the card. In the end I found the quickest way of doing it was to put the card in my digital camera and format it from there. Once the image was copied over the Pi booted up and XMBC was up and running.

I didn’t have a lot of time to test it nor did I have any media content on the Pi so I connected up my Samsung Galaxy Note to the Raspberry Pi and then I could play any of the music or video stored on the phone. Music playback was great with no issues at all, I only had one SD video to try and that worked fine. So I still have to test HD content and different file formats as well as streaming over the network and the addins but as a very simple video and music player it worked very well.

More soon and for now here is a video of it in action.

6 thoughts on “Video: First look at XBMC on Raspberry Pi”
  1. This may be what takes me away from Windows Media Center in the end. I have a setup with several extenders and it’s fantastic, but with more and more HD TV content which won’t play on the DMA2100 extenders I’m looking at alternatives.

    Do you know if XBMC can see and play WTV files? That might be a stop gap for now…

      1. I have now installed OpenElec myself and – sadly – I can confirm that it does not play WTV files (in my setup at least). It does work very nicely apart from that though, with just a bit of sluggishness through the menus, but sound, video etc all working well and accessible by adding my Media Center PC as a source. I wonder if there’s any way to make it work…

  2. I noticed a fair bit of overscan in the youtube video (edge of picture looks cut off). Is there any way to adjust it?

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