Just finished building an awesome Raspberry Pi media center

Forums › Home Theatre (including HTPC and EPG Collector) › Just finished building an awesome Raspberry Pi media center - an interest?

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#681046 3-Sep-2012 21:29

Skolink: Bener are you using CEC to control the RasPi with your Samsung TV remote?

Assumed, but not confirmed - it just worked without an setup, on both raspbmc and xbian!

reven

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#681047 3-Sep-2012 21:31

the best looking media centre will be ouya when it comes out early next year. it should have a full webbrowser, chrome, it will support several streaming services (should include netflix), and officially will run xbmc. its $129USD delivered i believe.

ill get one, but my pis are also proving to be pretty good, always improving little by little. playback is perfect if not using DTS sound (i dont have a receiver setup atm).

timmmay

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#681059 3-Sep-2012 22:18

I may wait for ouya. I'd have to buy blu ray, I use ps3 right now.

Skolink

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#681178 4-Sep-2012 09:43

bener:
Skolink: Bener are you using CEC to control the RasPi with your Samsung TV remote?

Assumed, but not confirmed - it just worked without an setup, on both raspbmc and xbian!

So have you tried controlling it with your TV remote, or only with the wireless keyboard and mouse?

JonnyCam

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#682182 6-Sep-2012 10:24

Skolink: Bener are you using CEC to control the RasPi with your Samsung TV remote?

Assumed, but not confirmed - it just worked without an setup, on both raspbmc and xbian!

I'm just started using my pi with my old samsung LCD (series 3, no usb ports) and after turning cec back on, the remote works well with xbian.
Just had to select the 'recorder' in the cec setup once, and it seems to work fine.

Not many buttons, but enough to navigate / play.

bener

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#682195 6-Sep-2012 10:50

Wow, OUYA looks awesome...

timmmay

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#682208 6-Sep-2012 11:18

Yeah the Ouya will cost not much more, once you take into account shipping, case, power supply, leads, decoder licenses, etc. It has a Tegra3 chipset, which is MUCH more powerful than the R Pi.

If you want to hack around with a small computer the R Pi's awesome. For a media centre Ouya is probably the go.

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timmmay

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#682321 6-Sep-2012 13:34

Can you run Skype and a USB webcam on the Raspberry Pi reasonably well?

reven

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#682331 6-Sep-2012 13:45

timmmay: Yeah the Ouya will cost not much more, once you take into account shipping, case, power supply, leads, decoder licenses, etc. It has a Tegra3 chipset, which is MUCH more powerful than the R Pi.

If you want to hack around with a small computer the R Pi's awesome. For a media centre Ouya is probably the go.

running the latest raspbmc with pvr and have to say, the pi is actually performing pretty good. its hooked up to the same tv as my main tv server (core i5, 16gb ram beast) and ive switched to using the pi for watching everything. (tv is still a work in progress, because my tv server runs 4therecord, playing around with mediaportal while i wait for 4tr support).

the ouya is cool, and i will get one, but dont discount the pi, its actually performing really well now, has come a long way in the last 2 months.

timmmay

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#682338 6-Sep-2012 13:57

There's bunch of articles about other mini PCs here. I figure more power just means faster and smoother navigation, better quality video calls, that sort of thing.

reven

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#682342 6-Sep-2012 14:04

timmmay: There's bunch of articles about other mini PCs here. I figure more power just means faster and smoother navigation, better quality video calls, that sort of thing.

video quality should be about the same if doing hw decoding, which the pi is. sure navigation is faster on a pc or on the ouya, but its still pretty good on the pi now.

having said that I had to turn off background fanart in movies/tv shows (not a big deal) and thumbnail view for movies is currently a no no. but using banner view for tv shows and its smooth.

CYaBro

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#682362 6-Sep-2012 14:33

reven, can you watch live TV on the Pi with the PVR setup?
Where did you find the info on getting it setup?

Will it work with MediaPortal TV Server or do you have to use 4tr?

Opinions are my own and not the views of my employer.

reven

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#682379 6-Sep-2012 14:46

CYaBro: reven, can you watch live TV on the Pi with the PVR setup?
Where did you find the info on getting it setup?

Will it work with MediaPortal TV Server or do you have to use 4tr?

yes you can watch live tv on it.

all you need to do is
1. install raspbmc (windows installer for raspbmc)
2. go into the raspbmc settings and select download nightly
3. 2 options will come up, select xbmc-pvr one
4. let it install then go into settings \ addons \ enabled addons \ pvr clients
5. select and enable/configure your PVR backend (mediaportal is available here, no fortherecord yet)
6. go back to settings \ live tv, click enable
7. your pi is all setup.

if you're new to xbmc pvr, you will need to setup your tv server first.

for mediaportal, just download the latest version (1.3.0.0 alpha1 or the 1.2.3 stable build), download the mediaportal xbmc tv server addon (mediaportal requires a addon in the tv server folder) from here http://www.scintilla.utwente.nl/~marcelg/xbmc/tvserverxbmc.html
follow the instructions in the zip/rar file.

you will need to setup your tv server before raspbmc (otherwise you wont be able to connect to it).

since im using 4tr (for the record) I had a quick go setting up mediaportal last night using DVB-T (4tr uses DVB-S so i can get sky channels), seems to work fine, my dvb-t signal is weak though so that was affecting playback. ill have a better go this weekend and see if i can improve reception or use my DVB-S card in mediaportal.

also if you have never used xbmc pvr before, timeshifting isnt yet available, they are slowly working on this feature, and some platforms/backend support it but not all, and not the pi.

CYaBro

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#682400 6-Sep-2012 15:36

Awesome thanks!
Can you view the EPG and setup recordings?
I assume watching Recorded TV isn't a problem then either if it can handle live TV?

Is it just as easy to setup XBMC-PVR on a PC do you know?

Maybe we should start a new thread on this?

Opinions are my own and not the views of my employer.

reven

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#682408 6-Sep-2012 15:47

yes you can view epg and schedule recordings in XBMC. but you cannot yet do a series link/reoccurring/whatever your pvr calls it inside xbmc yet, you can only do one off recordings. they are still deciding if the xbmc frontend should be exactly the same and provide the same options for series recordings or allow each backend to have their own options (since each backend has various different features and are quite different).

but having said that, when using 4tr i just use its iphone app or webservice to schedule reoccurring recordings and use xbmc to watch live tv/playback recordings.

the idea behind xbmc is every client should be pretty much the same, so setting up xbmc pvr on any platform is the same (once you have xbmc pvr installed, for windows just download it from http://packages.pulse-eight.com).

im currently running

backend server
- For the Record

front ends
- 3x XBMCBuntu PCs with PVR branch
- RaspberryPIs with raspbmc and PVR branch connecting currently to mediaportal backend
- Windows 7 with XBMC pvr branch

also use to have
- ubuntu 12 with xbmc pvr branch connected to tvheadend server (when i was running a linux server)

also running a mysql database so sharing video library between the clients (helps with the raspberrypi, that machine doesnt have to scan for new content and can pass off the sorting/searching to mysql).

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