# Raspberry Pi with XBMC = Raspbmc



## BD55 (Oct 18, 2011)

Raspberry Pi with Raspbmc, anyone? I haven't seen any threads on it, and I would love to know how well it works with everyone's setup. My ideal would be a Raspbmc behind my TV pulling 1080p movies from a well stocked NAS.


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## nova (Apr 30, 2006)

Brandon,
Sorry I can't be of much help on this, can only pass on what I've read. Looks pretty slick but I have heard that it has some stability issues. Have a look at OpenELEC if you haven't already.


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## ALPHUX (Nov 28, 2007)

Surprisingly Rasplex seems to be one major burgeoning area of HT that the Shack is a little lean on (judging by my single search results with only 2 mentions!).


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## Mike P. (Apr 6, 2007)

I've never heard of it until now but it looks interesting.


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## CSB (Sep 12, 2013)

I'm running a Raspbmc setup in my family room. It's connected to my network via Ethernet, and accesses my media from folders that I'm sharing on my main PC. The setup works great but I have come across a couple issues (nothing that couldn't be fixed):

1.) I wouldn't recommend connecting the Raspbmc wirelessly to your home network. Unless you have an incredibly fast wireless connection or you have low quality video files, your playback will be stuttering or at the very least pausing and buffering throughout the movie. For me that’s just not acceptable.

2.) Pre-scrape your movies and TV shows with Ember Media Manager. Raspbmc can automatically scrape the information online when it reads your media files during setup, but the whole process is very slow. The first time I setup mine it took close to 8 hours to scrape 600 movies!:gulp:

3.) I have had my setup going on 2 years now. And in that time Raspbmc has crashed and lost my media info about 3 times. Nothing was deleted from my hard drives, but when I went to watch a movie or TV show there was nothing to view. The only way to get the info back was to tell Raspbmc where my media was on my network and have it import everything from scratch (yup….8 hours of waiting every time). But I have recently found a plug-in that automatically backs up my media info and all the other Raspbmc settings to a small data file that is saved on the memory card. The last time the system crashed, I used the plug-in to restore the back-up and was watching a movie in about 10 minutes.

4.) Depending on the brand and how new your TV is, if you connect the Raspbmc with an HDMI cable you will be able to control it with your TV remote. I’m running mine on a 46” Sony Bravia and it works very nicely. But if you need to type something (like the title of a movies you’re searching for), using the on-screen keyboard becomes really annoying. So I got a mini keyboard with built-in trackball (IOGear GKM681R/GKM681RW4). It’s something you may want to consider for your setup.

5.) When I first set everything up and connect it to my AV receiver with the HDMI cable I couldn’t get anything more than 2.0 sound. The only way I found to fix this was to connect the Raspbmc to my TV’s HDMI input and then connect my TV to my receiver. Not sure if this is how it was supposed to be done in the first place but now I get full 5.1 surround sound.

6.) I think that Raspbmc and XBMC in general work best with movies, TV shows, and online content. You can use it to view pictures and play music (even with AirPlay), but I find it annoying. For example, when you tell XBMC where your movies and TV shows are on your network it saves this info in a database which it updates when you add new content. It doesn’t do this for other media. So every time you go to the pictures or music section in the menu, XBMC will pause as it reads the folder info. This can be a really long pause if you have hundreds of files.​
Ok this post ended up being much longer that I thought it would be. All-in-all the Raspberry Pi running XBMC is well worth the $40 price tag.


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## davidburn (May 10, 2007)

BD55 said:


> Raspberry Pi with Raspbmc, anyone? I haven't seen any threads on it, and I would love to know how well it works with everyone's setup. My ideal would be a Raspbmc behind my TV pulling 1080p movies from a well stocked NAS.


I currently use one in my bedroom for streaming TV series and movies. Its streaming wireless and has no problem with 1080p and is surprising quick for the size, my Samsung remote controls all operations.


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