BUILD A Pi-POWERED MEDIA CENTRE

Start 2022 off right with Jonni Bidwell’s outrageous media centre, powered by Pi, Kodi and just one too many LEDs.

Ever since there have been Raspberry Pis people have been making media centres out of them. Even the original Pi, thanks to its VideoCore SoC, was able to play 1080p content smoothly, 256MB of RAM notwithstanding.

Media centre distros quickly sprang up to exploit this and for a time using your Raspberry Pi as a media centre was seen, rather unfairly, as an unimaginative thing to do. Media players on Linux have a rich history (and MPlayer is still going strong), but the first to make it on to the Pi has its roots on the original Xbox in the early 2000s. Apart from being a platform for playing Microsoft’s Halo, this console was very popular with homebrew enthusiasts, since (thanks to easily exploited buffer overflows in popular titles) they could be made to run unofficial titles.

One such title was the Xbox Media Player, which in 2008 (underlining that by then it was much more than just a player) became XBMC (Xbox Media Centre). This application found its way to the Raspberry Pi by way of the RaspBMC distribution, put together by then high-school student Sam Nazarko and released not long after the Pi itself.

Today, thanks in part to threats from Microsoft, XBMC is known as Kodi. RaspBMC has a new name, too: OSMC (Open Source Media Centre), reflecting the fact that builds are also available for Vero and first-generation Apple TV devices.

Kodi can be installed on just about anything running Linux. It works great as a desktop tool (even on Mac and Windows), but if you’re looking to make a dedicated media player out of it then it makes much more sense to deploy a tailor-made distro for that use case. OSMC is a great choice, but by far the most common Pi-based multimedia distro is LibreELEC.