Install and configure XBMC on Raspberry Pi

About 2 months ago I bought a toy called Raspberry Pi. I could not resist buying because I was going to put an emulator of old gaming consoles on it (Sega, Dendy, etc.), which I did in the end. But, in connection with a recent post on the media center for this computer, it was decided to install a media server at home.

What we have

At the time of reading the post about the XBMC port on the Raspberry, I had the board itself, the Rainbow Pibow case, the ASUS RT-N13U router, the monitor 23 "and the macbook.


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What we want to see

This router was bought meaningfully, as it has a USB 2.0 connector with the ability to connect a hard disk. As I understand it, you can connect an external hard drive to the router, make a couple of strokes with a magic wand and this disk will be available in the network environment (you already understood that everything will not be so easy). The Raspberry board will have to take video and music from a network drive and play it. In addition, I would like to teach her to download torrents to a hard disk in a router.

To install and work with the media server, my equipment was not enough. It is advisable to connect the board to the home network without wires, in case you need to connect the console in another room and not suffer from pulling the twisted pair through the apartment. To store files, you need a hard drive, it must be either an external hard drive, or a full-fledged network storage, but I'm not ready yet to lay out a large amount of money and stopped on a USB HDD. It was also necessary to resolve the issue of board management, because connecting a full keyboard to it is quite funny, considering the size of the “raspberry”. There is a TV remote control option via HDMI-CEC, but I have a monitor, not a TV. I decided to find a miniature keyboard with a touchpad so that it would be convenient to use the media server and, if anything, could work comfortably in other distributions.

As a result, I bought the ASUS N13 Wi-Fi adapter, which is on the list of supported Raspberry devices (I found out about the list after the purchase, so I was just lucky), an external Seagate Backup Plus Desk 2 USB 3.0 hard drive, a Trust Tocamy mini-keyboard and another SD card (on each map by distribution, so that it is possible to enable both raspbmc and raspbian).


All purchases cost me 5500 rubles, which in my opinion is not so much.

Installation of the distribution kit and connection of the adapter

The installation itself is quite simple, and a good wiki has been made to help users. To install the distribution with Mac OS X, you need to insert a memory card into the card reader, execute 2 commands in the console and the image is successfully recorded. Next, the memory card is inserted into the raspberry, we plug in the power cord, HDMI and power cord. After following the instructions on the screen, we see the system start screen.


I apologize, the screenshot is not mine, borrowed from Google.

With the Wi-Fi adapter, everything turned out to be pretty simple too. Without removing the power cord, you need to insert the adapter into the USB connector of the board. In the interface of the distribution, go to the program - Raspbmc Settings - Network Configuration. We change Network Mode to Wireless (WIFI) Network, scan networks and set a password. Perhaps the "raspberry" will ask you to reboot. During the reboot, you can remove the network cable and the board will be connected to the Internet wirelessly.
And here's another nuance, quite often the system downloads updates (everything works for me for 2 days and 2 times loaded updates), and this is minus 10-15 minutes of watching movies. In the settings, you can disable the auto-update system, if it will annoy someone.

Hard drive installation

Could not assume that this item will be so many problems. Yes, on the one hand, my router works with external hard drives, but it was worth two nights of dancing with a tambourine around it. Fortunately, the HDD has its own external power supply. And so, after connecting the hard drive, the router found it. A 2 terabyte USB HDD was detected in the web interface. Asus has its own functions for working with hard drives and printers, but they work “natively” on native firmware, if they work at all. After several hours of torment, it was decided to upgrade to the adapted firmware "from Oleg" . Voluntarily, through a web-muzzle, the router did not allow this and had to use the Asus firmware recovery utility.

On Oleg's firmware, we managed to set up an FTP server. All the computers at home saw the contents of the hard disk through FTP perfectly, but there was nothing in the network environment. The problem was in the wrong setting DDNS. Another hour or two and the long-awaited HDD appeared on the network on all computers.

From the Raspberry side, everything is set up very easily. We go to the video - files - add a video, specify the location of the files by clicking the browse button, go to the bottom of the list in the list and click on the Windows Network (SMB), and then we find our shared folders. We also do music and photos.

Unfortunately, I was glad not for long. In the morning I opened the web-face of the router to set up a torrent-rocking chair (yes, there is such a connection in the asus) and then connection errors got to it. A few more hours of torment and it was decided to abandon the idea of ​​connecting the external drive to the router directly.

The external disk has a USB 3.0 interface, just like my MacBook. I decided to connect the disk to it and share it for the entire network already from the laptop. There was another problem. On Mac OS X, starting from version 10.7, the SMB protocol is backward incompatible with Windows, which puzzled me. The shared folders on the PC are visible to everyone, including the MacBook, but on the contrary, problems already appear - the PC does not see the MacBook folder. A bit of searching and the solution found is SMBUp . Installed in 2 steps, reminded the directx web installer in Windows. After installation, you need to select the folders you want to share, and turning on the program and saving changes occurs when you click on the close button of the program, which also surprised me a lot. In general, it all worked. All heavy files are now being downloaded to an external disk, Raspberry takes files from it (in the settings you need to add the source of media, using the same protocol, but in a different location).

Let's sum up

Raspberry Pi for me - a toy that has finally found practical application. Using it as a media server is quite convenient: you throw files on a hard disk in one room, and you look in another - a kind of SMART-TV connected to your home network. But this smart tivi is not without problems.

• Firstly, there is absolutely not enough power. First of all, I advise everyone to do overclock (in the settings, you can either manually change all the characteristics of the board, or select one of the profiles)
• The second problem is applications that are additionally downloaded from the Internet. The process of downloading is very simple and convenient, but working with them is similar to mockery. I tried youtube: a long download of the application, then after a few menus you can get to the video search itself, a long search, video download and viewing. It's good that at least the video does not slow down, but for viewing you need to spend 2-3 minutes on previous actions (this is not a tab in the browser to open)
• Third - it is convenient to use my keyboard, but still it would be much more familiar with the TV remote control. I saw wireless keyboards in Chinese online stores that resemble TV-consoles in form and size, and on the bottom side there are all the corresponding buttons
  
• Fourth, I want to say about the hard drive and network. Maybe for other routers things are better, but for myself I concluded that it is better to go broke and buy a normal network drive connected to the network via cable

I hope that someone my post was useful and interesting, thanks to all!