Saturday, November 3, 2012

Building my own xmbc media client box

Update:  I was finally successful in replacing my old disabled by the corporation media box... Raspberry Pi using the Raspbmc distribution:  http://mystry-geek.blogspot.com/2013/05/finally-got-raspberry-pi-to-try-out.html


I've given up on netgear. Building my own media center box. I tried out the xbmcbuntu distro booting from a flash drive and it was very polished and more capable out of the box than any commercial media device. 
But I hear that Sabayon Linux includes a very well configured version of xbmc, so I am installing that version on an old box with a green system that only draws 60Watts to see 
how it performs there. Concerned that it might need more graphics card than that mother board provides.

The best two things so far... a ted talks channel and apple movie trailer channel.
I am on Linux, so I did the following:
To create the bootable flash drive to try out the xbmcbuntu release I got the iso from here:
http://xbmc.org/download/ 
Click on the far right icon and save the .iso file.
Then you need to write the .iso out to the flash drive, I used the following command:

usb-creator-gtk

to bring up an interface to burn the .iso to the flash drive.  I gave the device a couple of Gigs of space to save stuff perminantly so I could play around with things.

Then I had to figure out how to get to a selection menu on boot up to get a menu to select the flash drive to boot from.  On my asus eee pc I had to go into windows and disable express gate software, then I could press esc and f2 at boot and get to the little text menu to select the flash drive.  
Once I booted into xbmc I was a little amazed.  The interface is very stunning and polished.  It blows away anything can get from any vendor at this time.   It has hundreds of plug-ins to allow you to access many websites.  
I had a Ted talks channel and an Apple movie preview channel working in just seconds.
When I get home tonight I am going to try xmbc with the mediatomb server running on another box I have to see how they work and play together.     

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