Media streamers
In order to follow our feature on building a streaming media server, you will need some software. This DVD includes the package for EmbyServer, the program used in the article. The archive is called MediaBrowser, the previous name of
Emby, and you will need Mono to run it after unpacking. If possible, install from your distro’s repos instead, but we have included the archive for those that cannot.
A media server isn’t much use without something to play the media so we‘ve included a number of home theatre type media players. Kodi is the main choice and that’s covered on the next page. Alternatives we have included are OpenELEC and OSMC, both of which share roots with Kodi but have the minimum amount of distro to be able to run the software. All of these are based on the old Xbox Media Centre (XBMC), a name that’s became increasingly out of date so it was renamed to Kodi. OpenELEC is supplied as a number of gzipped image files. Unpack the one for your hardware and copy it to a flash memory device – a USB stick for the PC images and an SD card for the Raspberry Pi options. You can unpack and copy with a single command in the terminal
$ zcat OpenELEC/OpenELEC-Generic.i386-5.0.8.img.gz | sudo dd of=/dev/sdX bs=1M
where /dev/sdX is your flash device. Then boot from the flash drive. In the case of the PC options, this runs an installer, much as you would see when booting from a CD.
OSMC (Open Source Media Centre) is also supplied as gzipped images for the Raspberry Pi, to be installed in the same way. In both cases, there are separate images for the Raspberry Pi Model 2. That model’s improved CPU makes it a much better candidate for watching high definition content, the older Raspberry PI B can struggle when presented with 1080p video. To install on a PC, there are RPM and Debian/Ubuntu packages that will download and install the latest version for you, simply install them with RPM, Yum or gdebi in the usual way. With most distros you only need to open the relevant package file in your file manager. LXF