XBMC is a great media center interface that works on many platforms including the Raspberry Pi. It’s a popular software for photo, music, and video viewing, which also allows a lots of fun add-ons to enrich your media center experience. In this post I will show you how to download and install XBMC on a Raspberry Pi.
A Little XBMC Background
XBMC stands for XBox Media Center, because it was originally designed to work on Xbox, but now it is a cross platform entertainment media player that supports Rasbperry Pi. There’s three variants of XBMC: OpenELEC and Raspbmc.
Download and Install XBMC on Raspberry Pi
Here I will describe how to install Raspbmc. It’s a very simple process. First of all fire up terminal:
wget http://svn.stmlabs.com/svn/raspbmc/release/installers/python/install.py chmod +x install.py
Now we need to run the installation script with sudo privileges.
sudo python install.py
You will then be greeted with a screen similar to the one below. You are now using the installer. Simply follow the instructions and you should be fine.
That’s it!
Installation can be found in this official post:
http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Raspberry_Pi/FAQ
Raspberry Pi XBMC Issues
There are still some known problem with XBMC working on Raspberry Pi.
- Fast forward/backward does not work, but stepping back/forward does work. You can go back and forward using left/right arrows. This should be fixed in future release.
- No navigation sounds. But sound from music and videos are unaffected by this.
- DVD image file playback does not work well.
- USB CD drive can’t play music.
Alternatives to XBMC on Raspberry Pi
Some people might find XBMC runs slow on Raspberry Pi. Although you can try to resolve the slowness issue by changing lighter skins, or over-clocking the Raspberry Pi, you might want to find an alternative to try out.
There isn’t many options at the moment. But you can try to use something called omxplayer.