Making a smart TV with XBMC and a Raspberry Pi

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Media Master

For just a small amount of money, you can turn any television set into a multi-use, smart TV by adding a Raspberry Pi and XBMC. In this article, we will help you start out with the XBMC media center.

The Raspberry Pi can take on a wide range of tasks, but one of the favorite applications is using the Raspberry Pi as a media center.

Adding a Raspberry Pi to a plain old boring television set lets you play clips from YouTube and online media libraries, and you can even stream video to the TV from a data storage device or an external hard drive. Getting started on creating these capabilities is easy when you use distributions like Raspbmc [1] or OpenELEC [2] together with XBMC media center software, which is in the process of changing its name to the Kodi media player [3].

XBMC-based Rasp Pi distributions like Raspbmc and OpenELEC only install the media center system as it is. (See the box titled "Installing Raspbmc and OpenELEC.") The user is responsible for adapting XBMC after the first start, and tailoring XBMC to your own environment is often more difficult than it looks. This article offers some helpful tips on operating XBMC. (Also see the "Raspbmc or OpenELEC?" box.)

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