2012 05 14 13 09 57

There is now another version of XBMC for you to try with your Raspberry Pi. Raspbmc is a XBMC project designed for the Pi and today it’s gone in to beta.  As with the other projects you download an image and then use an image tool to copy it over to an SD card. 

I have done lots of testing with the OpenELEC version and it will be great to see how this one works, details from the blog post:

 

When trying the beta, please remember that this is a test build. Some things will be broken and performance won’t be at its very best. What I’m trying to say is that this beta will not reflect the final performance of Raspbmc, and remember, Raspbmc performance and features will improve in future updates too.

The beta comes in the form of an Gzipped image file, available for download here. Windows users can restore directly from USB Image Tool, and Linux and OSX guys can just run something along the lines of:

gunzip -c installer-testing.img.gz | dd of=/dev/mmcblk0

Note: you need at least a 2GB SD card. Raspbmc will use the full size of your card.

The installers will be available for release, but not for testing purposes. If you’re not comfortable with putting the image on your SD card, I’d advise you give this one a miss. The UI installer looks a bit rough around the edges at the moment: you expect to see Microsoft Scandisk pop up at any second and tell you its scanning for surface errors.

There is a discussion here on the forums so you can give some feedback on the beta. Please make sure, before you ask something though that you’ve read the Wiki, especially the FAQ section.

If you like what you see, please consider making a small donation to help fund the release. I suspect I am going to have to upgrade the servers, yet again. While the project’s files are mirrors, the blog itself is quite demanding to keep up and the CDN redirection backbone still uses the Raspbmc server.

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