[H-GEN] media centre

[Peter Robinson]

Hi All,
You might recall I was asking about Android "solutions" for a media 
centre before Christmas. (Thanks for the feedback by the way.)

I decided in the end to go the Raspberry Pi route. This was partly 
because I wanted to play with one to see if it was suitable as a 
platform for some student projects.

Anyway I ended up getting a Pi with a case, a mini-usb cable, 2 HDMI 
cables (I needed one so something else) and a SD card with Debian wheezy 
pre-installed for about $80.

Here are my thoughts:

It all went well for my test as a Linux platform for student experiments 
but not so much as a media centre so I bought another SD card for $20 
and installed Raspbmc (there is a tool that writes a bootable tool to 
the card that runs and installs a variant of Debian with the required 
XBMC support that boots straight into XBMC).

In XBMC I then installed plugins for Youtube, TedTalks,  iView (and 
other catchups) and a mythtv client.

The XBMC user interface is pretty slow but when it comes to running HD 
video there were no problems.

It looks like I need to purchase a codec for mpeg (a few dollars) to run 
the mythtv client (at the moment I get audio but no video).

The extra nice thing is that the tv remove will drive XBMC (although 
entering text is a bit of a pain - but there is an Android app for that :) )

Overall I am happy - I can put up with the slowness in the GUI  for the 
flexibility (and price).

The other nice thing is - what to experiment with a different 
OS/configuration? well just get another SD card, install what you want 
and then decide what SD card you would like to use at any given time. 
It's a bit like having multiple VMs.



Peter