We have many ways to consume media these days but our main method is still through our TV (even it might be via streaming technology). The Raspberry Pi is well suited to displaying media and since the day of its release users around the world have been creating media centers based on the Pi. In this project, we’ll show you how to do it for yourself.
With the image copied to the SD card, insert it into your Raspberry Pi along with your wireless keyboard and mouse and other connections, such as Ethernet and HDMI to your TV. The last connection to make is the power which will boot your Raspberry Pi.
On your first boot up OpenELEC will lead you through a series of screens that will set up your media center. Once complete you’ll be returned to the main menu which is split into sections to catalogue your pictures, videos and music. With any of these categories you can easily import content from a variety of sources and the following steps are repeatable for all types of media that you wish to import. If you haven’t already inserted a USB hard drive, with movies copied on it, into your Raspberry Pi and then navigate to the Videos menu and then to Files. From here a new dialog box will appear and you’ll be able to browse to the USB drive and the movies contained therein. Your movies will appear in the Videos library and you can select and play them from the list. Content can also be stored on network drives, such as a NAS, and OpenELEC can connect via many standards such as SSH, NFS and Samba, enabling content to be centralized in your home and available to multiple media devices.
OpenELEC also comes with a series of add-ons that can enhance the experience and you can find a selection of these in the Add-on menu for each category, eg a great video addon is the Revision3 channel that broadcasts lots of maker and hacker-based shows. You can easily install the add-on by finding it in the list and clicking Install, and OpenELEC will handle everything from there on. For those of us in the UK, you can also install BBC iPlayer functionality thanks to Kodi.
Controlling OpenELEC using a wireless keyboard and mouse is the default method, but there are other stylish and consumer-friendly ways of doing things. First, there’s FLIRC, (available from the PiHut store) which is an infrared receiver that can be programmed to use your existing remote to control OpenELEC.
Alternatively, if you have a spare Android tablet knocking about there’s a free app called Yatse that turns your tablet into a multimedia controller. This app can show your media catalogue on the tablet screen, and enable you to browse and select media which is then played on your television.
NOTE:
Media centers were one of the first projects to emerge for the Raspberry Pi on launch and they have gone on to become increasingly popular. In fact, they are so popular that the Raspberry Pi Foundation has invested in their development. Speaking to Eben Upton recently, he said that he’s a keen user of OpenELEC and is extremely happy with the performance of the latest version on the Raspberry Pi 2 with it. While the Raspberry Pi 1 and 2 both share the same Videocore IV GPU, which means that they both can easily work with large 1080p video files. The OpenELEC user interface is also quite a CPU-intensive process and it was common for users of the original Raspberry Pi to overclock their Pis to coax out every last ounce of performance. For Raspberry Pi 2 this isn’t the case, because of the immense improvements made to the CPU and RAM, and means that Raspberry Pi 2 is clearly the stable base that you need to build your media center upon.
