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today a Raspberry Pi.
People love Raspberry Pis. We love Raspberry Pis. Yes. Essentially, it's
a $25, $35, $40, $70 if you buy it
with a bundle-- it's a little tiny computer.
It's kind of a
cousin to an Arduino. It's a controller. It's a computer. But we're going to install
some software on it, OpenELEC, that is going to turn it into a
fully functional media player.
And not only will it stream
your local video collection or musical collection to your
home theater or your stereo or wherever you want it to go-- We're going to get Netflix
and Amazon on it as well. How cool is that? Here's everything you're
going to need, people. A Raspberry Pi board. We prefer the Model B because
there's more memory on it, and more memory is
generally a better thing.
An HDMI cable to
connect to your TV. Either an Ethernet
cable to connect into your router or
a USB Wi-Fi dongle. Temporarily, just for
setup, you need a keyboard. And we're going to need a USB
power supply-- essentially a microUSB cable
that you would use to charge a tablet or a phone.
A two amp power supply is
a very, very good idea. Technically, it'll
run on one amp. And you'll need an SD card to
install the Linux distribution that you need. Oh, yeah.
So in this case, we're
going to keep it simple and use a thing called
BerryBoot, which is a very easy way to do
multiple distributions so you can try them out. But we're going to use that
to install OpenELEC, which is kind of a XBMC distribution. BerryBoot will download and
install everything for you. It's very easy.
But if you want to get more in
depth with Raspberry Pi stuff, our sponsor lynda.Com actually
has some Raspberry Pi courses. Lynda.Com/diy, please
check them out. So you select OpenELEC,
you pull the power, plug the power back
in, restart, and you get something that
looks like this. After the bootloader,
you'll get this.
Yeah. Well, yeah. After the boot--
there's a couple minutes of black screens and
letters and stuff. But there's one more
thing we're going to need to actually
make this practical.
A controller. Yeah. Well, you could
use a USB keyboard, but that'd be inconvenient. And we like
technology, so what you can do is, in XBMC, if
you go into the settings, there's an option
for remote controls.
So you go to System,
Settings, Services, and then Remote Control. We already have it
enabled, but you can select that, "Allow programs
to use this to control XBMC." Once your remote
control is set up, you can unplug your USB keyboard
and fire up your app inside of your Android or
iPhone or whatever else you're-- whatever. I mean, I'm sure there's a
BlackBerry XBMC control app. I hope not.
Don't encourage them. That's cold, man. Actually, you can now, on
some of the newer Blackberrys, you could run Android apps
on them in an emulator. It's really cool.
So the XBMC official apps
will work perfectly fine. But I really like an app
called Yatse-- Y-A-T-S-E-- for Android. Yeah, I was going to
say it's Android-- Android-only, I think. Why would you like that over
the XBMC native control? So the control parts work fine.
But there's a bunch of add-ons. Like, you can browse through
your media using thumbnails. It has Chromecast
support, so you can stream from the Raspberry
Pi into your Chromecast if you want. Lots of cool things.
But if you're just
needing control, the official app is fine. So you've got
this, which I guess you can control
the weather, right? You can view the weather at
this point is just about it. We should probably set the
ZIP code for the weather, or we're going to
get busy again, which always makes me laugh. But you were going to
tell us about adding media so we can actually see stuff.
You need to add
media at this point. You can control it, great. So adding media is really easy. So you can do
things like, if you have all of your
media on a USB drive, you can just plug that in and
then add that as a source.
That's probably the
easiest way to do it. You probably already have
a machine in your house that already has your entire
video collection or audio collection-- Like a FreeNAS. Ooh. At the very least, a shared
folder on your Mac or PC.
And we can actually
mount that using XBMC. Excuse me, using OpenELEC. So it's very similar. You go into Add
Videos, you Browse.
And then from there, you
want to go all the way down to Windows Network, SMB. And then from there, you'll
see your workgroup and the PC. That you want. And then you should hopefully
see the folder that you shared.
So in this case, I shared
my Downloads folder. So we'll go ahead and add that. All right, so our
Downloads folder is added. And then you can see all
of the different stuff that we have here.
Cool. So I've got a video file
here that we can play. And hopefully it'll work. Ignore all those other
ones because this is a personal computer.
So you don't want to know. A couple of things you don't-- You don't want to know. Have you been
burying bodies again? Not quite as bad. Yay, media.
It worked. Cool. So as you can see, it's not
instantaneous sort of thing. But it's still working.
You'll have to
wait a little bit. So getting media to play
in your Raspberry Pi from a USB thumb drive,
a USB hard drive, or off of a machine or a
FreeNAS box, or UPnP server on your home server in
your house is pretty easy. Pretty easy and pretty free. Yeah.
But doing things like
Netflix and Amazon Video, which we mentioned
earlier, that, you're going to need some software
that you need to pay for. Yeah. So it used to be that there was
an API for Netflix that allowed developers like the XBMC crew
to create plug-ins or devices or software-- whatever
you want to call it. It was really, really easy
to access Netflix's services.
Forget it. It's gone. Yeah. What there is,
however, is playon.Tv.
So for either an annual fee
or a lifetime subscription, you basically-- let's
call it $20 to $120, depending on whether you
buy it on sale for a year or for lifetime,
get the HD version, don't get the get
version, get PlayLater. But in any case,
playon.Tv-- I think for $20, we got playon.Tv. And we installed that on here. Yeah.
And so the setup for that
is, you also add the files. But in this case, you add it
as a universal plug-and-play source. Right. So we have this
set up here where we have Amazon
and Netflix added.
And we should point out,
the first time we added it, we got it to connect. But nothing would play because
we needed to actually purchase the MPEG-2 codec
for Raspberry Pi. Which is another $2 or so,
whatever British pounds convert to. So you purchase the codec on
the raspberrypi.Org website.
You configure it
in the text file. Basically you turn a
key on that unlocks it. And then once you
have that running-- you have your PlayOn
server running-- then it just works how you
would expect media to be. So here's all of a bunch
of Adventure Time episodes.
Is this your Adventure--
so obviously, not a Netflix
interface right now. And you're going to need
a Netflix subscription, or whatever the premium
services that you do. But I'd say it starts faster
than the Windows shared media. Oh, the irony.
And then you got some stuff. Some definite
compression going on, but it's better than
no Netflix, I'd say. Right. Because essentially, playon.Tv
is grabbing your legit Netflix account, recompressing
it, and streaming it over the interwebs.
So for $30 for an annual fee,
I was a little disappointed with the interface they
ended up with on XBMC. Yeah. At that point, you might as
well just get a Chromecast and then get a
better experience. But for free stuff, if you
already have tons of media, and you have a
Raspberry Pi, why not build a Raspberry
Pi media server? And if we're doing Netflix
wrong through playon.Tv, comment down below on
YouTube or tweet @diytryin.
Or send us an email,
diytryin@revision3.Com. Yeah, and yeah. We'd love to hear about
projects you'd like us to build, of course. Subscribe, diytryin.Com
or youtube.Com/diytryin.
Goodbye. Whoa. That was a good one. Man.
All righty. Kind of hurt. I'll wait until this
isn't working anymore. And yeah, we'll
pick up a keyboard, and we'll do all that again.
And then from there, everything
is going to work perfectly. I don't know what
just happened there. I apologize..