Building an XBMC media center using a Raspberry Pi. Installing and Configuring XBMC on Raspberry Pi

Below is a wall of text blah blah blah, you can skip.

If you have not heard of the Raspberry Pi, this is a small PC (board with process and other modules) with which you can do anything. The characteristics depend on the model, I took the last of the powerful Raspberry Pi 3 Model B, it has the following characteristics:

• CPU: Broadcom 2837 quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 64bit (1.2GHz), OpenGL 2.0
• RAM: 1Gb
• Video output: HDMI
• A / V output: A / V output 3.5mm jack 4 pin
• USB: USB 2.0 x 4
• Network: WiFi 802.11n, 10 / 100Mb RJ45 Ethernet
• Bluetooth: Bluetooth 4.1, Bluetooth Low Energy
• Memory card: Micro SD
• GPIO: 40

You may have started wondering what you would do with this machine in addition to the media center, and rightly so, there are just a lot of things you can do. In general, I actually bought not only for the media center, but also for streaming games from PC to TV. And yes, it works super - FullHD @ 60fps, input lag 1-4ms, loss in quality is minimal. For example, the same software on a medium-power laptop with 8GB of RAM, GeForce 650M, and i5 pulled in 2 times worse quality than raspberry and hung. But here it is more likely an old wifi module, as well as software for Windows in Java, and for sorts of things. Who cares about this - Moonlight. So the owners of Nvidia cards with Nvidia Share support can make themselves a complete analogue of Steam Link which costs 7k, for 2.5-3k. And even better, since you will not be limited by the stim library, you can run any software for streaming. True, active cooling is required, but it costs 50 rubles.

You can also deploy full-fledged desktops on it, but they will not be so responsive, but Raspbian (Debian + XFCE) just fly, you can work in office suites, the load on the percent does not jump above 10%, the RAM is always kept less than half. Lags start only by opening chrome with media. 1080p on YouTube last time when I looked, dragged with jams, but there they released an update on the GPU of some kind, they said they raised the performance, but I was no longer interested. I can watch the same YouTube through the media center, which will be discussed.

You can install Android TV if you want. Google ported Android TV for Raspberry 3, there are no official assemblies at the moment, but there are already a bunch of custom ones, android TV supports raspberry already at the kernel level, it does not lag at 1080 at all.

Lovers of old games will also have a lot of room for nostalgia. I'll just give you the RetroPi link, dig further yourself. There are just a bunch of such assemblies. In general, all old consoles are emulated, even PS One and PSP, of course, on the last one without lags and everything in 1 OS. Even emulators of consoles are of the type of fighting games that used to be in shopping centers. People make complete play stands at home, even special manipulators with buttons are sold on such a bundle.

Those who have their hands not from one place, and a rich imagination, do just incredible things. for instance smart mirrors () and other incredible things. You can deploy OwnCloud and other services, nginx, apache, but even your own servant girls, no problem.

And if you go back a little to the web, you can even run phpStorm and work on it. I have not tested it, but the guides are in bulk, I think it will start immediately, and after optimization by guides it will work much better. Well, you never know, you want to be perverted). Please note that the system eats about 20-40MB there - the rest will go to phpStorm.

If you don’t know what to give an IT guy for a holiday, it’s just a sure thing, at first it’s not clear what to do with it, and then you start googling, and you sit and think about what to try first. Everyone will come up with an appointment for him, and for that kind of money he is just a godsend. It will be played for more than one month, and the gift will be very memorable.

To get ahead of the questions, I'll immediately write what I took. Please note that it does not have any disks, it works via Micro SD, so it's better to buy it from the seller right there. At least 8GB. 4GB - takes up Raspbian, about 2-3GB is occupied by a medical center (on a separate OS, the media center itself is 100 MB). Enough for me, I just took two 8. If you want a media center, as well as watch movies from online, then it is better to have an external drive, otherwise take 32GB + right away, so that with a margin, but still an external one is better hDD... I ended up with an 8GB flash drive for the system + 4TB + 1TB external drives. No cooling is needed for the media center. Sometimes it overheats but not critical. It works for me 24/7 - why? You will find out later.

KODI Media Center

KODI and varieties

I'm amazed how I didn't know about Kodi up to this point - it's just a super media player for everything that can be played. He, therefore, builds are created for all popular systems - Windows, Linux, MacOS, iOS, Android. If you have some old device that can be connected to a monitor, TV set and it has at least 500MB of RAM, you can deploy such a media center on it. Those. Raspberry is not required here at all. It's just that if you want something small and not voracious to the TV set that doesn't make any sounds at all, then this is an excellent choice.

This player has a bunch of distribution options. A bunch of unofficial distributions with different pros and cons, only for Raspberry I tried the following options:

• OSMC - for the first time installed this particular assembly, and returned to it, it also put it to my mother for the squeeze. On screenshots in articles everywhere KODI 17, in OSMC Kodi 16 at the moment. What is the disadvantage of this system? It only has a stable build. For some, this is not even a disadvantage. Those. no nightly builds, beta versions, nothing (upd. for Kodi 17 builds are already there, the guide is at the very bottom). Only release, only hardcore. As they say, chik-chik and in production. A big plus, which is very important for me personally, is Debian under the hood. If you are not familiar with Linux, this is a dummy item for you, but for me personally, this is scope for customization.
• LibreELEC - as I understand it, a spin-off project from OpenELEC, much more active than the second, has a default KODI with its own repositories for updating. I used it not long after OSMC. It is very easy to switch to beta versions of the system and back to stables. At such a transitional moment, Kodi is wonderful - since the changes are cardinal and somehow did not want to sit on the old one, but still returned to OSMC to wait for the official release of Kodi 17 - since this system, for me personally, has a fatal flaw - there is Linux Kernel + compiled and configured to autorun Kodi. No package managers, nothing there. The rest of the system rather outweighs OSMC, if you discard the fact that you will not do anything with the system here, since compiling from source is such a thing. You need to understand and keep in mind that Kodi has a bunch of add-ons that integrate with system programs, but at the same time without installing them, and on the debian it is a matter of a couple of seconds to put them, and here hemorrhoids for hours, or even days.

Those. if you need maximum performance, although there is no particular difference in speed between them at all, you do not want to tune anything, see Linux, you are not interested in it - take LibreELEC, in this regard it is a cut above OSMC. Until you run into needs that require intervention in the system, this will be a wonderful distribution. But, for example, if you wanted to deploy FTP servachek on your own, then you will understand why, and then oops! and that's it, we arrived, in OSMC this can be done through apt-get, and even easier, there is an installation script FTP server right in the system, just say what you need and he will prescribe and configure everything himself, and on LibreELEC you need to find the program yourself, lucky if the binary is already there for your architecture, otherwise you will have to compile, in any case you need to manually configure and write autorun with the system - in general, an amateur activity. From experience I will say that running into an addon that requires system software is very problematic, rather you will find a binding in Kodi for some software that you want than run into integration, I just don't know about it. But I just ran into it once, and then I rolled back to OSMC. Fortunately, the roll takes about 10 minutes, since the base is quick to scan, all the same on disks.

There are also a bunch of different assemblies with codes for Rasbperry - but these are the most famous. The previously mentioned RetroPi also has the ability to launch KODI and it is preinstalled there, and vice versa, it can be launched from KODI through an add-on, but there are builds only for LibreELEC (google Gamestarter). And now KODI is officially developing a section in the media center for games and repositories for their additions - apparently soon it will be at the level of KODI itself.

So, before you do something, you can put KODI on your OS right now and see what kind of beast it is. True, at the time of writing, the stable version of KODI 16, which is radically different visually from KODI 17. In terms of functionality 1 in 1. But the UX has changed a lot, so the impressions of the versions are different.

What formats does KODI support?

An obvious question for this kind of software. I've always considered the leader in this VLC, and I wouldn't even be surprised if they somehow collaborate. But I would completely rephrase this question: What formats does KODI not support? I'll just answer like this - I don't know, but it even eats DVD \\ Blu-Ray ISO images. So if you have an excellent collection of films on disks lying around, and there is external drives, and you want to build a media library, then you shoot images from discs, put them on a disc and voila - you're done.

Again, is there a doubt? It's easier to put it on a PC and feed it the format of interest. I can say one thing for sure. Videos in the VC1 codec - buggy everywhere, even on a powerful PC - as this codec requires the purchase of a license, which costs 1 pound per off. site and binds to the piece of iron forever. Well, you never know, you have such videos, I warned;)

What is this beast and what does he know how

I will talk about everything in order. Since he has a lot of opportunities. On the screenshots, half is disabled, and the other is not shown.

Films

This is the section for which I loved KODI so much and was incredibly delighted. If you have your own collection of films, the same ISO files with DVD discs, it doesn't matter - he collects it all into a single media library. Adds posters in the desired language, description, cast, trailers, posters, ratings, etc. Keeps track of what you've watched and how many times, where you left off, and even has the ability to hide the plot to avoid Spoleira. Groups films by collection if the film has more than 1 part. All of this is finely tuned, from scanning parameters to output and playback parameters.

He takes information about films from the equally interesting site The Movie Database - this is something Wikipedia in the world of films and TV series. To a couple of films, I myself added trailers from youtube in Russian and names - after updating the media library, all my changes came instantly, without any pre-moderation - which is just cool. I didn't even know about such a site. In general, such data sources can be connected through add-ons, there are both Kinopoisk and IMDB. But due to the fact that there is no API or is expensive, pages are parsed there - which is a very, very long time. TMDB has API free and unlimited for everyone. The site is simple. Some information about the media file can be parsed directly from the file, chapter previews, video format, resolution, codec, etc.

The media library, based on the parsed data about the film, is split into several options and allows you to view it according to different criteria: genre, year of release, a specific actor, producer, film studio, rating, title, collection. In general, the films are laid out on the shelves and you can view them as you like or set up your own filter for all data at once. In the display of all films, you can change the display options, which will allow you to customize the media library as you like.

On the main screen, selecting the films section without going to it, it shows the films that you started watching, but did not watch, the latest films that have been added to the library. As well as unchecked, random films and offers of specific genres.

Serials

This section is similar to the movies section. Its difference is that it shows how many episodes of a given series are in your media library and how many you have watched. If you replenish it promptly, it will show new episodes. He also indicates which episode you need to watch now, as it marks the already viewed ones. He also takes information from TMDb or other sources. But I warn you right away, do not forget to specify in the settings to hide the description for the episodes that have not been watched - as from experience, for example, the series "Lost" has such descriptions that the episode does not need to be watched at all. So I highly do not recommend enabling this option, since when the video is paused, it is also displayed and the eyes themselves climb to read. It's also cool that each series has its own rating and not a general one for the entire series and you can set your own for a specific series.

Music and muses. video

These sections are suitable for those who store music locally. I use Google Music so I haven't even tried them. I suppose it can also parse information from various sources. I know for sure that there is a party mode that randomly twists something and does something else, but I honestly haven't tried it. I just hide these two sections. There is the possibility of installing add-ons, and for example, you can also listen to Google Music. But you need to understand that GM does not have an API and this addon has extremely poor functionality.

TV and Radio

I really wanted to try TV, because what I saw on the internet is just impressive. He, like all smart TVs, knows how to plan a TV program, delayed recording of broadcasts, pause, etc. For this, unfortunately, you need IPTV, and our provider is only planning this service and it is not known when it will appear. But if you have one, this media center will cover 100% of the TV usage. Seriously, if I have an IPTV, I don't see any reason to switch to mainstream TV mode with Raspberry. It's just an all-in-one solution. Although I don't watch TV, I wanted to indulge in it. I believe it is still integrated with the media library somehow. At a minimum, he clearly knows how to write down new episodes for the series and save it in a separate folder of the series, therefore, the library will be replenished automatically. Considering that it can be kept on 24/7, and the telly itself is off, it's just 10 out of 10.

Video

This section is not so much about video as a file manager. Here you can set folders for the library and direct selection of files from media. I'll touch it a little later, a mostly completely useless section. I set it up once and forgot, as the update is automatic.

Supplements

This is another big plus of the media center - it has the ability to write your own add-ons for the media center in Python. There is your own repository where you can add an application, if it, of course, meets the requirements, or you can create your own, independent repository with your own software and conditions, which are also in bulk and they are no less interesting than the official ones.

For example, there is YouTube, Twitch, Pusbullet from what I tried and I really liked it. You will be prompted to install YouTube anyway, since the trailers are loaded from there and this addon is needed for playback, and I put Twitch out of curiosity, I'm not a fan of watching how they play, but sometimes when you walk around the apartment it's cool to listen to a couple chatting interesting people... You can add various RSS readers and follow the news directly from the media center.

Also, for example, there is even a Docker addon! Yes, they are not exactly called add-ons, Kodi calls them "applications", since they install software on the system and add integration with KODI. So yes, by installing docker there, all notifications will go to Kodi. Yes, you can display all notifications from your phone, call notifications on Kodi.

The only thing that is not there, and then, not a fact - a browser. But I honestly didn't even look. What for? It's just not needed, seriously, all needs are covered by add-ons or the kernel.

In fact, this section is a treasure and, probably, the core of the entire media center, since it allows you to do what is not there and expand what is already there. The media center has just an awesome API, I'm serious, although not complete, for example, I found the missing command that I needed, but then I found how to do it using regular means. I really want to write something, but there are no ideas yet. Well, of course, the community does not sit still, there is simply darkness darkening with additions, you can find anything. And this is only the official repository, in the unofficial ones, no less interesting addons, as a rule, they are taken out for reasons of ease of development, or because Kodi does not add them to its repository for reasons of fear. I think you have guessed what kind of addons we are talking about, I will write about one of them below.

After 2 months of use, crawling on the Internet in search of information on Kodi and everything connected with it, I was delighted with their community. It reminds me of something drupal, there are a lot of smart people, a lot of freebies in the form of add-ons and high-quality third-party software. I'll talk about one more later, I even gave them a shot at how cool things the people in the community are doing. Kodi is a great example of OpenSource, and I’m just outraged that I didn’t know about it before.

Web server

This is not the web server you are thinking of. Kodi has its own built-in web server, which is enabled by a check mark in the settings. What is this? And this is a very interesting thing, although I do not use it.

This checkbox activates the web server that hosts the site, which fully allows you to manage the media center. By default, it is available at http: // DEVICE_IP_ADDRESS: 8080. You can forward the port to the Internet and control the media center from anywhere, it has the ability to set a login and password for the entrance, right under the activation checkbox - do not forget!

This section is one of the reasons why I am already reviewing the upcoming Kodi 17, as it has been completely, directly radically redesigned this feature media center. Now this is not a stupid white page with a list of files and player controls, it is a full-fledged tool for working with the media center directly.

It has all the same sections, except for TV and Radio. It fully allows you to view, edit and manage your media library. You can both create a play queue and control the current playback, replays, rewinds, pauses, volume - everything instantly arrives at the media center itself.

# First of all, we need to create a folder where our USB drive will be mounted. # I decided that I would create a Media folder, and there inside a 4TB folder for a specific drive. # Go to OSMC via ssh. ssh [email protected] # Osmc password # Making the first folder mkdir Media # Making the second mkdir Media / 4TB # And now you should find the name of your disk in / media (it must be connected) ls / media # I call it 4TB # Now we bind it to our folder. First folder WHAT, then WHERE. sudo mount --bind / media / 4TB ~ / Media / 4TB

And the last command must be executed every time you reboot. In general, not a problem, considering that for me it only restarts when I mess something up and it freezes.

Therefore, try FTP only if you have problems with SFTP. Seriously, you won't get + 100% speed, and hemorrhoids are guaranteed.

SFTP

• OSMC: osmc \\ osmc
• LibreELEC: root \\ libreelec

I very, directly strongly recommend changing passwords from these users if you want to open ports on the Internet. It is done simply, log in via ssh under the given users and write the passwd command - after which you will be prompted to enter a new password.

• Address - the IP address where to connect and where the media files are. I have a dynamic IP and the router is able to send data to all sorts of no-ip.org and other services there automatically. He also provides his own, without crap and registration (ASUS). Therefore, figure out how best to get around this, changing the IP every time is not a fun thing, especially if you want to give this mess to someone like a mom. Believe me, she won't figure out how to change it. It's much easier to add.
• Path - here you can specify the base point to which ssh will connect. Out of the box, if you leave / home / USERNAME empty. Again, you won't go down a level through Kodi's built-in file manager. Therefore, it is better to specify media in this field. Thus, when connected, it will go to / media. You will see all connected drives at once.
• Port - everything is clear here, SSH \\ SFTP out of the box is 22, I made it so that it is defined as 2222 externally through the router. the router catches an appeal on port 2222, and redirects it to port 22 locally. You can make 2222 whatever you want. The more random there is, the less chance of hacking.
• Use the login and password above from those indicated, if you changed the password, then, of course, write your own.

If everything is ok, this connection will appear in the general list to choose from, and when you select, the / media folder will open and you will see all the connected drives and can do whatever you want.

For example, I select 4TB / Movies and mark that this folder contains movies, then it will scan it itself when new files appear on SFTP, or rather, on a flash drive. Those. you won't have to configure it anymore if you don't change anything in the settings.

Yarr

Later I talk about another plugin, it's much cooler! I advise you to start with it right away.

It is quite obvious that with such a large community, an excellent media center and a very powerful API, something useful could not fail that will not be added to the Kodi repositories. And such software in bulk. I will only tell you about one thing.

Since I wanted my mother not only to watch what we have, but also to be able to watch the missed episodes of serials, most of which are sometimes not shown on TV in Russia at all, the only place where you can get them is torrents. And yes, you can stream torrents on Kodi.

There are a lot of addons, as I said, but there is one, which was made by a Russian developer, and it works quite tolerably, although some moments in it annoy me, but even my mother was able to figure out how to use it the first time. It is called Torrenter. There is all the information on how to install it. You can upload a file with a repository to your home folder via SFTP via FileZilla. And in Kodi select "Install from zip file" by selecting this file, a new add-on repository will appear. This is where the Torrenter add-on lies. I think this will not be difficult.

I will only briefly describe what he can do. Of course, he can open .torrent files, from navigating inside folders and files, launching the necessary ones. Also knows how to play magnet links. It is more convenient for me to upload torrent files via SFTP to my mom by placing them in daddies.

There is a search by trackers, a bunch to choose from of normal Russians, only 2-3, but the search is very, very clumsy, I guarantee you, sometimes it's faster and easier just to go from a computer or mobile phone, find what you need, download a torrent file - and upload it via SFTP. So it will be easier to return to it.

A very convenient option is that you can set it different behavior for working with torrents. For example, there are three options when opening a torrent: Ask what to do, Delete, Save. The first option offers the next two, and they, in turn, either delete the file after viewing, or leave it on the disk until you clear it through the addon or physically delete it from the folder. He removes them not instantly, but quickly enough. I think you have a couple of minutes after closing the file viewer - after which it deletes them. So if for some reason you need a file, you can pause and drag the file from the add-on folder, which you yourself specify.

It works well in general, there are no complaints about the speed of work. The new interface, which they are actively adjusting to the "Search window", is simply enchantingly inconvenient, it does not have a part of the functionality, it is not at all in the Kodi style, in general, everything of its own, inconvenient management and other problems.

He also knows how to integrate with torrents by Web interfaces, but I do not understand what it is and why. Apparently, if you put a rocking torrent into the system, it will allow you to control them. I see that. Well, on the same LibreELEC, you just can't put any of this, the hemorrhoids will be hellish.

At the end

The article of course came out oh oh oh how healthy. I didn’t even expect it to stretch like that. But I painted as much as possible. There is no point in describing more, then I recommend that you personally install Kodi on the OS, it weighs a little, and try. If you like it, think for yourself where you want to put it, leave it on a PC or somehow connect it to a TV set.

As I already wrote, it flies on my Raspberry Pi 3 Model B. Of course, he does not know how to 4K at all, but 1080 pulls in general perfectly. Because of this, I bought a second media center specifically to replace my mom's smart TV. So far, she has a couple of days of experience using it, but she really liked it. I once took her android prefix, and once explained how to watch online. There were always some problems, a lot of questions, but with Kodi there were no questions at all, everything turned out to be simple and clear to her. I'm really looking forward to when Kodi 17 comes out on OSMC - as it seems to me they will fix the problem with SFTP, and the new code itself is simply gorgeous. It's even simpler than the old one. And according to personal feelings - much more productive.

I don’t regret in the least that I bought Rasbperry. After all, one must understand that here you can limit yourself not only to the media center. You can do whatever you want, and buying a TV box for 6-7k you get, say, Android TV and that's it. Yes, there you can roll Kodi from above, but you need to understand that this is still not quite the same. Again, you won't put much of anything on the system. Connecting to Android TV via ssh and other protocols will most likely not be so easy, since they obviously closed it out of the box for security purposes. Immediately plugged into the network and immediately Kodi, it starts very, very quickly. Seconds can be 10-15. And again, room for action, you can put the same RetroPi, or Rasbian. And if Raspberry becomes obsolete and stops exporting Kodi, which is very doubtful, because Kodi pulls all versions of the Rasbpberry Pi so far, even version 1, which has generally funny characteristics and 512MB of RAM, then it can always be remade for other tasks. Those. In fact, such a bundle is bought for years, and in a year nothing will have to be changed because it does not export iron. Moreover, now Kodi is rolling out a very cardinal update of versions and the new version is even faster than the old one, so in the coming years I do not think that Kodi will start doing something that will not take out anything.

So if we talk about Rasbpberry, this is an awesome device for its money with a huge range of applications. I am directly convinced that this is an ideal gift for an IT specialist, especially one who does not know what he wants. This is not some kind of gadget that will become outdated in two years and with one task, here it is a toy for an IT-specialist for his needs and interests. I already wrote that initially I generally bought it primarily to stream toys from PC to TV and play on the big screen, and purely by chance ran into Kodi. Moving smoothly to Kodi, this is a really great OpenSource product that is a delight. I don’t understand why TV manufacturers don’t start cooperating with them. It's just like Android for mobile phones, it bends completely, is customizable, you can even install your own repositories. This would help both Kodi and smart TVs become usable. Considering the fact that the iron that he needs costs in fact multiples less than the raspberry. And this despite the fact that manufacturers directly having access to the TV signal, could integrate it into Kodi itself without any problems. Once again, I recommend you, if you are interested, put Kodi, it is better 17, not 16, and try it.

Update from 01/28/2017

In general, in the wilds of the forum, I discovered how to switch OSMC to Kodi 17 version. There is already a new repository ready. The update went smoothly and everything migrated perfectly. It works as fast as LibreELEC, it also has SFTP and works very fast, so there is no need to mess around with FTP anymore. Also, most of the videos were played via the web version in the HTML5 player - which, too, cannot but rejoice. Streams VERY fast.

If you still have OSMC with Kodi 16 - it is easy to distinguish it from Kodi 17, if your interface is not like in the screenshots in the article, but with a blue background and a horizontal menu in the middle of the screen - this is version 16.

How to upgrade OSMC Kodi 16 to Kodi 17

# Connect via SSH to kodi. The default osmc ssh password [email protected] # Go under the root sudo -s # Add a new package source (there is Kodi 17) echo "deb http://apt.osmc.tv krypton main" \u003e\u003e /etc/apt/sources.list # Update information about sources apt- get update # Run the update and reboot the system apt-get -y dist-upgrade && reboot

This article will describe how to make an IPTV media center out of a Raspberry Pi 2 Model B laptop with minimal investment.

1. Preparing the hardware

Here's how to set up your Raspberry Pi from scratch to IPTV. Configure impossiblewithout:

• MicroUSB phone charger
• MicroSD cards
• Ethernet connections without a password (if there is a password on Ethernet, use a router - connect your Raspberry Pi to it)
• HDMI cable
• USB mice (preferably wireless)
• Straight arms

2. Installation of a special system for the media center

Many people know that the Raspberry Pi runs on linux system... The Raspbian distribution is recommended on the official website (for those who do not know, a distribution is a modified operating system designed for specific needs). We are planning to watch IPTV and will use the distribution kit OpenElec.

to install this system, you need to write the universal NOOBS installer to the SD card. You can download it here

After downloading, unzip the zip file directly to your SD card. Also, do not forget to copy the iptv.m3u file (it can be found in the attachments to the article in the archive, unpack it). Insert SD card into Raspberry Pi. Check if a mouse is connected. Connect the microcomputer to the TV and then to the network via charger... A menu appears on one of the TV's AV inputs. It looks something like this:

Select OpenELEC with your mouse and click Install. The installation of the system will take no more than 5 minutes. After installation, the initial setup menu appears. There you can select the system language.

Is your first setup complete? Let's move on to the next step!

3. Setting up IPTV

To watch channels in HD quality (or watch paid channels), you need to configure the PVR client. It is already built into the system. To enable it, you need to do some manipulation. But we’re not scared, right?

Go to Settings\u003e Add-ons\u003e Install from Repository\u003e All Repositories\u003e PVR Clients. You will be prompted to choose one of the PVR add-ons. Select PVR IPTV Simple Client. Install it. Then click on PVR IPTV Simple Client again and select "Configure". In the Location box, use the arrows to select Local path, including Local network. Click on the inscription Path to M3U. The file manager will open. Select the iptv.m3u file and click OK. Then click on the "Enable" button in the menu. Close the menu, press the Home button (house-shaped). Select Settings\u003e TV\u003e General\u003e On. Then exit the menu, press the "Power" (shutdown button) and select "Restart". After rebooting, a new section will appear - TV. In it select "Channels". A list of channels will appear (quality comparable to HD).

4. Conclusion

This setup was done to watch HD channels, as the TV does not show HD channels, but it supports HDMI signal. You can use other playlists, for example with foreign channels, or thematic channels (sports playlists). They can be found on the Internet.

For its price, the Raspberry Pi is a great device for DIY creativity, Linux learning, and programming. At the same time, due to its low cost, low power consumption and small size, the Raspberry Pi can become the basis for a powerful media center built on the basis of XBMC.

XBMC is an open source media center project originally designed for game console The first generation Xbox (hence the name of the project - Xbox Media Center) and currently supports multiple platforms, including Android, Windows and Linux. Since XBMC is an open source project source code, then any user can create their own assembly, including for the Raspberry Pi. For this reason, a wonderful community of Raspberry Pi fans offers ready assemblies XBMC packages for Raspberry Pi.

So, the first thing you need is the Raspberry Pi itself. I ordered one of my computers from RS Components and the other from element14 and both turned out to be fine.

The next step is to install the XBMC distribution. The Raspberry Pi stores the operating system and programs on SD cards, so you need an SD card. I use a 16GB card, but you can get by with a smaller card like 4GB. What's great about SD cards is that you can have multiple cards with different distributions and try different configurations.

The best way to connect your Raspberry Pi to your TV is HDMI cablebecause in this case the audio and video will be transmitted over the same cable, which will simplify the installation. You can also connect audio separately via the headphone output. Note that the Raspberry Pi does not have optical output sound. A TV or monitor can also be connected using the composite output (bell), but note that with this connection, you will only be able to watch standard quality video and will not be able to get an HD image. Therefore, try to avoid connecting your media center with a composite video output. Sound parameters are defined in the Settings / System / Audio Output menu - here you can choose which output to use for sound, HDMI or analog (headphones). Also here you can select the audio transmission format - AC3 or DTS.

Now it's time to install the operating system for the Raspberry Pi. There are several variants of XBMC-based media center distributions at once, among the most popular are Raspbmc, OpenELEC, XBian and DarkELEC. All of them are based on the XBMC project and developed specifically for the Raspberry Pi, have minor differences, and in addition are supported by quite large communities. In this article we will use Raspbmc, since the author used this distribution for the lion's share of the time.

With your computer and a blank SD card ready, the next step is to download the distribution image. To do this, open the website http://www.raspbmc.com/download/ and download desired file... There are installation images for Windows and Mac OSX, or you can download an SD card image and burn it to the card. Check out all download options from the link above.

(Translator's note: on how to write an image to a card)

Immediately after installing and launching XBMC, you can watch the video in mp4 format located on USB disk, network drive or via DLNA server. For additional information I recommend going to XBMC.org. It contains a variety of instructions and tutorials for novice XBMC users.

To watch copies of DVD discs or files burned with Windows Media Center on your Raspberry Pi, you'll need an MPEG2 decoder available from the Raspberry Pi foundation for £ 2.40. Installing a license key is very simple - after purchasing you will receive an email e-mailwhich will contain the key. This code must be copied to the config.txt file located in the boot section (details on how to do this). The key must be entered into the config.txt file every time you reinstall the operating system distribution kit. Also, the key is bound to serial number your Raspberry Pi, so if you have multiple computers, you'll need to purchase a separate dongle for each.

Fortunately, most XBMC distributions have more simple ways add license code... For example, in Raspbmc you need to open the section Programs and download Raspbmc settingsthen in the tab System configuration open up Advanced settings, click on MPEG2 codec and enter the key you received by email. The Raspberry Pi foundation also provides a key to decrypt VC1 encoded files. You can also purchase this codec if required.

Now, with the available codecs, you can view files encoded in h.264 and mpeg2, i.e. you can watch TV programs recorded with using Windows Media Center (unfortunately, only without copy protection). Also, you can record video files to USB flash disk and connect it directly to the Raspberry Pi. Finally, you can record TV broadcasts to an external USB hard drive and watch them on your Raspberry Pi. I am using an externally powered USB hub to connect a 1TB external drive.

The contents of the USB device can be viewed in the Videos section. To do this, click Add files and then select the disk device. Now you can see the contents of the disc and select a file to play with XBMC.

You can also use UPNP technology to view the contents of networked NAS devices, windows computers and other servers. To do this, select the Add Video sources item and then click the Browse button. You can now select a content source. On my network, all UPNP devices were listed in the source list, then I added my computer to the sources and after that I saw the video files stored on it. Now I can watch videos from my computer on the Raspberry Pi, namely, I can watch the mkv, WMV, WTV, and also MOV files located on the Windows Media Center computer.

Most NAS devices have built-in DLNA servers as well as Windows Media Player can act as DLNA server... In addition, you can configure another Raspberry Pi as such a server, then connect an external drive to it and receive from it streaming video using a client on the Raspberry Pi. It is also possible to use iPad and Android devices as a streaming video server using programs such as Twonky Beam or Samsung Allshare... I was able to watch videos from my phone on the Raspberry Pi using the Twonky Beam. Finally, network resources can be added as content sources for any DLNA server, i.e. can be connected shared folders computer or server and view these files on your Raspberry Pi.

Windows Media Center also offers the ability to stream video using DVBLink software from DVBLogic. The DVBLink network allows Media Center TVs to transmit images to other devices on the network. Besides clients for Android, Windows Phone and iOS, there is a plugin for XBMC. By installing this plugin on your Raspberry Pi, you can watch live TV programs.

To do this, you need to download DVBLink for Windows and use its installer to connect a TV tuner and enable video transmission over the network. After that, you can download the plug-in for XBMC and, with its help, watch TV programs on the Raspberry Pi, use the EPG service (viewing the program guide), and also record programs.

Another way to watch live TV programs on the Raspberry Pi is with a network TV tuner like HDHomerun. This receiver has a built-in network port and is fairly easy to configure.

Plugins can be used to add many new features to XBMC, such as support for Youtube, Vimeo and other video hosting services, as well as Internet TV services.

There are plugins for connecting various media center remotes, for example I used my old infrared Windows Media Center remote to control my Raspberry Pi. However, it may be necessary to adjust the correspondence of the remote control keys to the media center functions.

You can also use your smartphone or tablet to control the XBMC media center. I am using the official Android app from the XBMC project and it suits me completely. In addition to performing the functions of a remote control, the application can display information about the current clip, as well as show the contents of discs connected to the media center. You can download and install the application using this link.

In addition to the above, there are many more interesting things you can do with XBMC, such as using the CEC over HDMI protocol to control your Raspberry Pi with a regular TV remote control. The CEC protocol allows remote control commands to be sent from one device to another, thus it is possible to transmit commands from the TV remote control to the XBMC media center. In addition, experimental XBMC features such as pause on air and on-air recording using servers such as TVHeadend, DVBLink, MediaPortal and MythTV can be used.

In this article, I haven't talked about the music and image related features. I will just say that these functions in XBMC are similar to those for videos. Those. you can listen to and view the contents of USB drives, network resourcesas well as UPNP.

It makes sense to get a case for your Raspberry Pi, there are a huge number of them and I got myself an acrylic case for £ 9.99 of this type.

So, despite its cost, the Raspberry Pi can be a great media center and at the same time help you learn XBMC and Linux. At home, I connected the media center to the existing one, on windows based Media Center, which stores all my videos, and also broadcasts live programs using DVBLink. That is, I used several Raspberry Pi as additional media players for every TV in the house.

In this article, I have described only part of the basic information. There are actually tons of other things you can do with XBMC. I gave only a starting point for your creativity.

If you need a device to transfer music, videos and movies to your other devices without a lot of expense, then the Raspberry Pi is a great solution. You can use a computer for this, and this is the most popular option, but if you want something more interesting, you can use the Raspberry Pi. It pairs well with the free Kodi media center.

In this article we will look at how to make a homemade raspberry media center Pi 3, how to install Kodi on it and get the media center fully operational.

We don't need much to build a Raspberry Pi media center. Here are all the main components:

• Microcomputer Raspberry Pi Model B + or newer;
• Additional Wifi module for devices lower than Raspberry Pi 3;
• HDMI cable to connect to the screen;
• USB power supply 2A;
• MicroSD flash card with 8 GB or more.

In addition, you will need a computer with which you can load the desired operating system and write it to the memory card. If you have all this, we can proceed with further configuration.

Building a media center Raspberry Pi 3

The Raspberry Pi is a cheap, yet powerful enough microcomputer for its price. The latest version has a 64-bit ARMv8 processor with a clock speed of 1.2 GHz, built-in Wifi and Bluetooth 4.1 adapter. Raspberry can work more or less as a desktop operating system. Of course, you will not play games on it, but it is quite possible to browse Internet sites.

We will use the open source project Kodi as the software for organizing the media player. There are several ways to install Kodi on your device.

Installing Kodi on Raspbian

If you have already installed any operating system on it, for example, Raspbian, then you can install this package from the official repositories:

sudo apt-get install kodi

sudo nano / etc / default / kodi

Find the line ENABLED and set the value to 1. You can also start Kodi right away by running in the command line:

Installing an operating system with Kodi

If you are going to use only the Raspberry Pi 3 media player and you no longer need any other operating system capabilities, then it would be better to install an operating system specially designed for it.

Kodi runs on two operating systems, OpenELEC and the light version of OSMC. You can download the OpenELEC image from the official site openelec.tv, the official site of OSMC is also in tune with osmc.tv. Alternatively, you can download the Noobs software suite and select the desired operating system from the list.

If you decide to download the operating system separately and install it manually, you will need to write it to a USB flash drive. If you are using Windows, you can use the Formatter SD Card and Win32DiskImager to write the system to a USB flash drive.

Select the correct drive letter for your flash drive and then select "Option" and check the box opposite "Full (Erase)"then press "Ok" and "Format"... After formatting, launch Win32DiskImager, select the image and click "Write":

If you are using Linux, you can use the dd utility to write. Just do:

sudo dd bs \u003d 4M if \u003d file_file.img of \u003d / dev / sdb

Here / dev / sdb is the file of your flash drive on the system. It is the USB flash drive that needs to be specified, because we are writing to it, not to the section. When the USB stick is written, you can insert it into the Raspberry Pi. Next time you boot, Kodi will be ready to use.

When installing the system from the Noobs archive, you will only need to write it to a USB flash drive, and then after downloading, select desired image from the list and wait for the installation to complete:

Setting up and using Kodi

Availability will be very convenient USB keyboard, with which you can control the Raspberry interface. Most of the standard keyboard shortcuts will work on the Raspberry Pi too. A modern Raspberry Pi 3 can also use a Bluetooth keyboard.

Also you have another management solution. it mobile app for Android - Kodi Remote. It can be found on the XBMC Foundation website.

After the application is installed and launched, it will automatically detect the device with Kodi if it is connected to the same home network as the smartphone.

It is assumed that you will be using Wifi to stream video to devices such as a TV, computer, tablet, or smartphone. But if the device is located far from the router then there may be problems with the signal, so you may need to use an Ethernet cable.

Usually, audio is transmitted via HDMI, but if you have a complex speaker system, then you may want it to receive surround sound too. This requires a 3.5mm jack. But to get good sound in this way you need an external sound module. You can select one of the available USB audio modules.

Alternatively, you can add a USB remote control if you don't want to use the mobile app.

It should also be noted that there are many different add-ons for Kodi that you can use. But try to install only what you need. The more add-ons you install, the slower your device will be.

conclusions

Building a Raspberry Pi 3 home media center can be tricky. But with all the components, you can do it in no more than an hour. Once Kodi is installed, you can customize it, add the necessary extensions, and add hardware add-ons for the Raspberry. After all this, your microcomputer will be able to have all the same capabilities as very expensive and complex speaker systems.