Raspberry Pi: A Quick-Start Guide, 2nd Edition (2014)

---

Figure 37. Managing add-ons in XBMC

Take a few minutes and browse the list of add-ons to see whether there’s something interesting to you. When in doubt, install it and take a look. It’s easy to remove an add-on if you don’t like it. Note that you need to make sure you have enough bandwidth for most add-ons, because they stream a lot of data.

Depending on the speed of your SD card and your Internet connection, you’ll experience a noticeable lag when choosing menu items in XBMC. This might get better in future releases, but for the moment you have to live with it and be patient when navigating through XBMC’s menus. However, playing content works fine, without any lags or staggering.

Finally, you should take a look at the Systems > Settings menu and see whether all settings match your local setup. If you’re using composite video, for example, you have to choose analog as your audio output device in Systems > Settings > Audio.

Add Files to XBMC

In XBMC you can easily add new movies, TV shows, or music using the Add Files menu in the Videos or Music menu. Before you start to add your media files, you should know how XBMC works internally. XBMC is more than a simple media player; it’s a full-blown media library that tries to automatically get as much information about your media files as possible. For example, XBMC reads additional information about your favorite TV shows from web databases and adds them to your library. This can be anything from an episode’s original air date to a short summary.

To do this, XBMC depends on a certain file-naming scheme—you can read all about it on the project’s wiki.^[80] Note that choosing the correct filenames and directory structures even affects XBMC’s main menu. If you add a directory for TV shows, for example, XBMC adds a TV shows menu item to its main menu. So, to get the most out of XBMC, you should rename your media files accordingly before you import them.

Video and Music Formats

XBMC supports nearly all container formats and codecs on the market. You’ll rarely find a multimedia file that the Pi can’t play. There’s one problem, though: the Raspberry Foundation licensed hardware acceleration only for the H.264 video codec. Fortunately, this is one of the most popular codecs available, but if you have video files using a different codec, you might not be able to watch them unless you buy a license for them. At the moment, you can buy licenses for MPEG-2 and VC-1 online.^[81] You provide your Pi’s serial number and get back a license key that you enter in Raspbmc’s Settings menu.

The easiest way to add files to XBMC is to attach a USB device containing your media files directly to the Pi. This solution works fine, but it also has some disadvantages. The USB device often is bigger than the Pi itself, and it probably consumes more power, too. In addition, it requires at least one of your valuable USB ports. A better solution is to store media on the SD card or to stream media from your local network. Because of XBMC’s great network integration, you can implement both solutions easily.

XBMC supports FTP, SFTP, SSH, NFS, and Samba out of the box, and you don’t have to configure much to get them all up and running. XBMC enables SSH by default, so to copy data to the SD card, you can use scp, for example, as you did in Use Secure Shell with the Pi. Run the following command from your PC’s terminal to create a folder named Movies in XBMC’s home directory:

!

maik> ssh pi@192.168.2.109 "mkdir /home/pi/Movies"

Replace the IP address with your Pi’s address. Note that Raspbmc also comes with a user named pi that has the password raspberry at the moment. Now you can copy media files using scp and add them to the XBMC library afterward.

!

maik> scp Pulp\ Fiction\ (1994).avi pi@192.168.2.109:Movies

Even if you use an SD card with plenty of space, it probably won’t be enough to store your whole media library. Also, it doesn’t make sense to always copy files before you can watch a film or listen to some music. That’s what network file systems such as NFS and Samba were built for, and XBMC supports them all.

Using NFS or Samba, you can host all your media files on your regular PC and stream them to the Pi when you want to use them. Configuring NFS^[82] or Samba^[83] is beyond the scope of this book, but the XBMC wiki has excellent documentation for all major platforms.

As soon as your media files are available in your home network via NFS or Samba, you can easily access them using XBMC. For NFS you don’t usually have to do anything, and you can configure your Samba settings in the System > Service > SMB client menu.

Control XBMC Remotely

If you want to use the Pi as a multimedia center in your living room, sooner or later you’ll want a remote control. If you have a modern TV, chances are good that you can control the Pi using your TV’s remote control. Modern TV sets use the HDMI cable not only for transferring video and audio data, but also for transmitting remote-control commands. In this case, your TV set will send remote-control commands automatically to the Raspberry Pi.

If your TV isn’t quite as modern, you can use some special hardware with an infrared dongle,^[84] but the easiest method is just to use your smartphone.

Not only does XBMC have add-ons for managing your multimedia files, it also allows you to install web interfaces for controlling XBMC remotely. Go to the System > Settings > Services > Webserver menu and enable the “Allow control of XBMC via HTTP” option. Then click the “Web interface” button and select Get More. In Figure 38, XBMC comes with several web interfaces, you can see the currently available web interfaces. Enable all of them so you can try them and choose your favorite.