This chapter contains a number of recipes for using ready-made software on the Raspberry Pi.
Some of the recipes in this chapter are concerned with converting the Raspberry Pi into a single-use appliance, while others use specific pieces of software on a Raspberry Pi.
4.1 Making a Media Center
Problem
You want to convert your Raspberry Pi into a super-duper media center.
Solution
To use your Raspberry Pi as a media center, you should go for the superior performance of the Raspberry Pi 4 B, as video playing is very processor intensive.
You can set up your Raspberry Pi as a media center during the NOOBS (New Out Of the Box Software) installation process (Recipe 1.6). Instead of selecting Raspbian as the distribution to install, select LibreELEC_RPi4 (see Figure 1-9).
LibreELEC is a distribution that optimizes your Raspberry Pi as a media center. It incudes the Kodi media center software, which is based on the XBMC open source project that was originally developed to convert Xbox game consoles into media centers. The code has since been ported to many platforms, including the Raspberry Pi (Figure 4-1).
Figure 4-1. Raspberry Pi as a media center
Raspberry Pi is perfectly capable of playing full HD video as well as streamed music, MP3 files, and internet radio.
Discussion
Kodi is a powerful piece of software with many features. Perhaps the ...
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