Dave's Most Excellent (hopefully) Pi Adventure pt 2: MediaPi

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Well in case you missed my previous Blog Post you can find it here.  In short, I am the Community Support Lead here at element14 and have decided to try my luck at getting pi on my face (wow what a horrible seque) in any case I decided to start super easy and build a media center using using a Raspberry Pi Model B v2 (512mB) and a Seagate 2tB external hard drive. If I can do this, anyone can, really ANYONE can do this

Here is what I used:

1 Raspberry Pi Model B v2 (512mB)

1 Mulitcomp Case

1 4gB SD card

1 Seagate 2tB external hard drive

1 USB to micro USB cable

1 Ethernet cable

1 USB Keyboad

1 HDMI cable

Step 1: Insert your SD card into an SD card reader, go to http://www.raspbmc.com/download/ and download the raspbmc program onto the SD card.

Step 2: Safely eject the SD Card  and put in the Rasp Pi, connect via HDMI to a monitor, I was lucky enough to be able to run the USB power from my TV to the Pi, make sure that you are also connected to the internet (the install process for raspbmc needs internet access to work)

Step 3: Raspbmc autimatically starts going, grab a coffee or turn your attention to getting some content to watch once its all done.

Step 4: Its all done,  download some skins, add ons, or do what I did and just play with the settings for about 45 minutes.

Step 5: Connect the external hard drive to your computer, do all that fun set up stuff and move your content on to the drive. Unfortunately all of my DVDs are well...DVDs and I spent the majority of my time finding the right program to transfer the DVD into a digital format, eventually I got one that will do what I need it to do and ripped a few movies onto the hard drive. It took about 34 minutes start to finish to convert a 2 hr 15 minute movie... I am sure there are other programs that could do it faster, but at this point I just wanted to see if it worked:) After you have your content all set up, plug the hard drive into the Pi and start it up.

Step 6: Select the destination file for where you want raspbmc to look for your content and enjoy your movie.

Step 7: Bust out the calculator and figure how long it will take to convert your DVD collection..cry...and get to work:)

Now that I have set everything up, I am going to go back and do it again, I think I am going to pick up a category 10 SD card with 8gB of memory, as well as set the Pi up to overclock a bit so it runs faster. Raspbmc seems pretty stable so I am not all that worried about overclocking. 

Even though I am really excited I was able to do something with my Pi, I think I am selling myself short by limiting my experience to just downloading a program someone else designed. I picked up a another Pi and will use the 4gB SD to play around for real versus just plugging stuff in and hitting enter a few times...not that there is anything wrong with that, I did just build a 2tB media center for less than $150  after all.

If anything what the folks over at rspbmc have shown me is that there is some pretty impressive programs that can work on the Rasp Pi. So I guess its time to hit the books and I will be showing off some novice programming skills in the bear future.

See anything I should be doing differently? Let me know in the comments section below.

Thanks! 

Dave

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