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If you’ve been following along with the last few blog entries, you should have a pretty good idea of how to build a Raspbmc device for cheap (What’s Raspbmc? Click here to start at the beginning.) Maybe you’ve already built one. And maybe it’s already achieved family-member status. 🙂 If so, congratulations!

In this last installment, I’m going to talk about enhancing your Raspbmc experience. I’ll also discuss some of the issues I had along with their solutions.

The topics presented below are in no particular order. It’s really more of a collection of Raspbmc recipes. So feel free to scan down the list until something catches your eye. And if you have a tip that doesn’t appear here, please leave a comment!

Fickle HDMI – When I first began using Raspbmc, the HDMI connection was a real pain. I’d finish watching one of my favorite movies, turn the TV off, and then return later to watch something else. Once I turned the TV back on, Raspbmc was nowhere to be seen. My only recourse was rebooting the Pi by unplugging it and plugging it back in. Not only was this inconvenient, but also extremely clumsy. Not shutting down Raspbmc properly before yanking the power can damage the filesystem.

If you experience this problem, the solution is to modify the /boot/config.txt file. Simply SSH into Raspbmc (User: pi, Password: raspberry) and edit /boot/config.txt using your favorite text editor. Add the following two lines at the end of the file.

hdmi_force_hotplug=1
hdmi_drive=2

Then save and reboot.

Setting hdmi_force_hotplug to 1 forces Raspbmc to use HDMI even if the TV or monitor isn’t detected. The other setting, hdmi_drive, controls the mode that HDMI runs in. Setting it to 1 forces Raspbmc to use DVI mode, which is merely HDMI without sound. This is NOT what we want. Setting it to 2 forces Raspbmc to use normal HDMI mode, which includes sound. This IS what we want.

Hulu/Netflix/Amazon Playback – One of the things that attracted me to Raspbmc was the ability to stream content from providers like Hulu. I had read about the Free Cable add-on from the Bluecop repo before starting the project. Free Cable is an XBMC add-on that allows you to stream content from both paid services (e.g., Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, etc.) and networks that make their content available online for free (CBS, Fox, etc.). So I tried it. And my experience with Free Cable was less than spectacular. Not only was it incredibly slow. But for many media sources, such as CBS, HGTV, etc., it simply didn’t work.

The solution for my woes wasn’t a Raspbmc add-on, but a desktop application called PlayOn. PlayOn is an application that acts as a middleman for streamable content. You install it on a PC and then supply it with credentials for whatever streaming services you use. It accesses content on behalf of Raspbmc and then restreams it. It’s fast. It’s simple. And it works.

At the time of this writing, PlayOn costs between $8.99 and $59.99 depending on your needs and budget. At the low end, they offer subscription model. At the high end, you can purchase a lifetime license.

A word of caution. To use PlayOn with Raspbmc, you MUST ALSO purchase the MPEG-2 license from RaspberryPi.com. Otherwise, Raspbmc won’t be able to decode PlayOn’s video stream. I didn’t realize this at first and all I got from PlayOn was audio.

When you purchase the MPEG-2 license, I suggest SSHing in to Raspbmc and adding it to the /boot/config.txt file using your favorite text editor. Just open up the /boot/config.txt file and paste the lines they instruct you to copy from the email you receive. Then reboot. Alternatively, you can enter the keys using the Raspbmc Settings program. But if you do, you’ll probably lose any custom settings you’ve added to the config.txt file, including the HDMI settings I mentioned above.

To use PlayOn with Raspbmc, you’ll need to add a uPnP video location. Start PlayOn from your PC, hop over to your Raspbmc device, and then navigate to Videos->Files->Add Videos. Click the Browse button and then select uPnP Devices. The PC running PlayOn should show up in the list. If it does, select it. If it doesn’t, check that your PC’s firewall isn’t blocking uPnP traffic. Once you’ve added the PlayOn source, you can use it by navigating to Videos->Files->PlayOn. I haven’t figured out a way to put PlayOn on the main Raspbmc menu. So if someone knows, please tell me how in a comment below.

Subtitles – The first time I curled up on the couch and started watching an English speaking movie with subtitles, I just about lost my mind. I couldn’t figure out how to shut them off. If you look around in the system settings you’ll find there isn’t a single subtitles on/off setting anywhere.

The trick to fixing this starts with playing a single video that contains subtitles. Press the “OK” button on your remote to pop up the On Screen Display. Then press the right button until the little speaker icon is selected. Press OK again. This will pop up the audio settings for the current video. If you scan down the list of options, you’ll find one called “Disable Subtitles”. Turn it off. And then at the bottom of the menu there will be another option called “Set as default for all videos”. That is the secret sauce. Select that and subtitles will be disabled globally. For videos that you need subtitled, you can navigate back to this menu to turn them back on for that single video.

Remote Updating/Cleaning – We store the bulk of our media on a FreeNAS box in a part of the house that’s about as far away from the TV as you can get. The computer I usually use to maintain our collection is just as far away. A common chore for me was having to fire up Raspbmc’s web based remote control to clean and update Raspbmc’s video library.

Raspbmc actually features a pretty slick JSON-RPC API. It’s what enables applications like Yatse to work as a remote control. Since it’s web based, you can also use it to do tasks like library cleaning and updating through your browser. I created bookmarks in my browser to make these sorts of tasks quick to do.

If you’re curious as to what services are available, here’s a link to the docs for Version 6 of the API. My favorite calls, and the ones I have bookmarked in my browser, are as follows. To use them for yourself, you’ll need to change the IP address to point to your own Raspbmc device.

This will update your video library.

http://pi:raspberry@192.168.0.7/jsonrpc?request={"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"VideoLibrary.Scan"}

This will clean dead content from your video library.

http://pi:raspberry@192.168.0.7/jsonrpc?request={"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"VideoLibrary.Clean"}

This will update your audio library.

http://pi:raspberry@192.168.0.7/jsonrpc?request={"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"AudioLibrary.Scan"}

This will clean dead content from your audio library.

http://pi:raspberry@192.168.0.7/jsonrpc?request={"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"AudioLibrary.Clean"}

File Management – When you select a folder as a media source, Raspbmc gives you the option of selecting that folder’s media type (TV or Movie). So you’ve probably already figured out that it’s best to have separate folders for your movie and TV content. What you might not have figured out is how your files should be named.

Raspbmc is extremely smart when it comes to file names. If you have a file named “Night.Of.The.Living.Dead.720p.mkv”, for example, it’ll be able to parse out the name and find it in the Movie Database. On the other hand, if you name the file “NOTLD.mkv”, Raspbmc will have no idea what the file is and you’ll probably not see the title show up in your movie library. So make sure you’re smart with your naming. If Raspbmc doesn’t add a title to the library, chances are it couldn’t parse the name or it couldn’t find it online. This also includes titles with accented characters. For instance, Raspbmc won’t be able to find “Les.Miserables.mkv”, but it will find “Les Misérables.mkv”.

I prefer to keep separate folders for each movie or TV show. For TV shows, you can also create subfolders, one for each season. For instance, underneath your TV folder, you might have a folder for “The Office (UK)”. And inside that folder you might have two folders, “Season 1” and “Season 2”, each of which contain the files for their respective season. If you follow this scheme, make sure you turn on the setting for “separate folders for content” when you add your content source in Raspbmc

Another cool thing about having your content in separate folders is that you can control the artwork that Raspbmc displays for a given title. You just need to deposit one or more of the following files in the same folder as your content.

Audio – I mentioned this in part 3, but it bears repeating one more time. Don’t use the mini-jack for your audio. You’ll just be subjecting your ears to bad stuff. Turn the audio-over-HDMI setting on and configure it appropriately for your home theater.

Remote Controls – If you haven’t ditched the mouse to control Raspbmc, you should. If you’re an Android user, check out Yatse. It’s a great remote control app you can use on whatever WiFi enabled Android device you have. I used this for a long time on my Kindle Fire before I got annoyed with the amount of time it took to establish a WiFi connection. I then dropped a whopping $14 on a SANOXY remote and never looked back.

Video Podcasts – One of my favorite things to watch on the Pi are video podcasts, such as those from Leo Laporte’s TWiT network. I really wanted to be able to automatically download shows as they were made available. And fortunately, the TWiT network features an RSS feed for video.

For TWiT’s “All About Android”, I wrote a bash script that looks like the following. Keep in mind that this is script runs as a cron job on an older FreeNAS box. Depending on what machine you use, you may have better regex facilities available to you. If you choose to use this script, you’ll need to adapt it to your environment and podcast source.

#!/bin/bash
 
cd "/mnt/Public/Media/"
wget http://feeds.twit.tv/aaa_video_hd -O feed.xml
 
# The version of grep that comes with FreeNAS doesn't support the -P option and Perl
# isn't installed. So we make do with what we've got.
LINKS=(`cat feed.xml | tr '\n' ' ' | grep -ho "<link>[^<]*" | grep -ho "http:.*.mp4" `)
LATESTLINK=${LINKS[0]}
 
FILENAME=`echo $LATESTLINK | grep -ho "[^/]*$"`
 
# We need to mangle the filename a bit to play nice with Raspbmc.
VERSION=(`echo $FILENAME | grep -ho "[^a0_]*_" | grep -ho "^.*[^_]"`)
FILENAME="All.About.Android.S01E${VERSION[0]}.mp4";
FILENAME="./TV Shows/All About Android/$FILENAME"
 
echo "Latest Link: $LATESTLINK"
echo "Destination File: $FILENAME"
 
if [ -f "$FILENAME" ]; then
    echo "File exists. Nothing to do.";
    rm feed.xml
    exit 1;
fi
 
rm feed.xml
echo "wget $LATESTLINK -O \"$FILENAME\"";
wget $LATESTLINK -O "$FILENAME"
 
# Telling Raspbmc to update itself.
wget "http://pi:raspberry@192.168.0.7/jsonrpc?request={%22jsonrpc%22:%222.0%22,%22method%22:%22VideoLibrary.Scan%22}" -O /dev/null

Reclaim SD Card – Perhaps you’ve decided to replace or upgrade your SD card. Or maybe you’ve had enough of Raspbmc and you’re moving on to something else like Openelec. In either case, you’ll want to reclaim and reformat that old SD card to something your PC can use again.

To do this you’ll need the tool that started us down this road way back in the beginning – the Simple UI installer.

Fire up the installer and you’ll be presented with this familiar window.

Simply select the SD card and click the “Restore device for formatting” button. It does its work pretty quickly. Once it’s finished, you’ll still need to format it.

The SD card should now show up in Windows Explorer. From there, you can right click on the card and select Format.

Conclusion

Those are all of the Raspbmc tricks up my sleeve. If you have any tips of your own, please leave them in a comment below. Good luck!

In part two of this series, we discussed hardware options for the Raspberry Pi. By now you should have a pretty good idea of what needs to be bought and what can be scavenged for your Raspbmc project. This is the part in the series where the rubber meets the road. I’m going to talk about where to get Raspbmc, how to install it, and what to do after it’s up and running. By the end of this article, you’ll be able to enjoy your media collection on your new Raspbmc device. So let’s get started.

First Steps

An SD card serves as primary storage for the Raspberry Pi. It’s where we place the operating system. And it often, but not always, serves as general purpose storage. Our first task is to get Raspbmc installed on an SD card.

Raspbmc can be downloaded for free from raspbmc.com. Click on the “Download” button at the top of the Raspbmc site. This link will take you to the download page. Here you’ll find a few options.

Simple UI Installer – This is the easiest way to take your first steps with Raspbmc. The UI installer is a small tool for initializing the SD card. It deposits a few files on it for bootstrapping the Raspbmc download and install process, which actually happens on the Pi. It’s available for Windows, OSX, and Linux and it’s extremely painless. If you think you might ever want to reclaim the SD card for another use, this tool also provides a nice “Restore device for formatting” option that puts the card back into a formattable state.

Network Image – This is a minimal disk image that’s not unlike the image used by the Simple UI Installer described above. It’s a barebones OS configured to download and install the rest of Raspbmc at first boot. Use this if you’re on an OS not supported by the UI installer. You will, however, need a disk imaging tool to write the image to an SD card.

Standalone Image – This should be used if your Raspberry Pi is Internet-challenged. It’s the full blown Raspbmc image and doesn’t require any network access for the install process. To write this image to an SD card, you’ll need a disk imaging tool. A popular one for Windows is Win32DiskImager (Disclaimer: I haven’t actually used Win32DiskImager with Raspbmc images, but it should work. If you try this, let me know if it’s successful.)

From here on out, I’m going to assume you’ll be using the Windows UI installer.

Installing Raspbmc

Before launching the UI installer, plug your SD card into your PC. When you fire up the Windows-based installer tool, you’ll see a window that looks something like so.

The Raspbmc Installer will scan your machine for removable devices on startup. If you plug in your SD card before firing up this utility, you should see it appear in the list. If it doesn’t show up, try restarting the installer. If the SD card still doesn’t appear after a restart, check to see if Windows sees the SD card. You may have bigger problems.

When selecting the device to write to, double-check and triple-check that you select the device that correctly corresponds to your SD card. Selecting the wrong device could be catastrophic to your PC, your data, and even your mental health.

The only other required checkbox here is “I accept the license agreement”. The other checkboxes do what they sound like.

If you plan to use DHCP with Raspbmc, don’t worry about the “Manually configure networking option”.

The “Install Raspbmc to a USB drive” option will allow you to install Raspbmc to another USB storage device plugged into the Pi. This could be another SD card entirely if you’re using a USB card reader/writer. But you’ll still need an SD card to bootstrap the install process, which will be the card you’ve selected in the installer.

Once you’re satisfied with your selections, hit the “Install” button. It’ll only take a few seconds to do what it needs to do. And after it’s finished, you’ll have a bootable SD card you can plug into your Raspberry Pi.

Raspbmc Setup First Boot

Once your SD card is all set, you’re ready to proceed with the rest of the Raspbmc installation. Before you go any further, make sure your Pi is powered OFF. Plug in your network cable, HDMI cable, mouse, and keyboard. If you want to use a remote control or WiFi adapter, leave them unplugged for now. Don’t worry. We can set those up later. Slide in your SD card and power up the Pi. Note: Plugging in peripherals while the Pi is on is generally a bad idea. Every time I’ve done this, my Pi has either locked up or rebooted. Consider yourself warned.

The very first time you boot from the Raspbmc SD card, you’ll see a screen that looks like so.

The installer’s version of Linux will then boot. This is where hardware and network detection occurs. If there’s a problem with either of these, you’ll see an error displayed here.

If all goes well, you’ll eventually reach a blue screen that displays a message like the following.

This is the point in the process where the meat of Raspbmc is installed. This part can take a while, typically somewhere between 20-30 minutes. It’s all automated. So feel free to go grab a coffee or a beer while all this is happening. But I suggest that you poke your head in from time to time to see what’s going on. The first time I installed Raspbmc, the device locked up during a reboot. I had to manually power cycle the device to make the install continue.

There are a number of things that happen during this process. Partitions are created and formatted, software gets downloaded, kernel modules are installed, etc. If you have the patience to watch the whole thing, you’ll notice the device even reboots a few times. The crude Linux text-based boot process will eventually transition to a much nicer boot splash screen.

After 20-30 minutes and one final reboot, Raspbmc will start.

Configuring Raspbmc

When Raspbmc boots for the first time, you’ll be asked to select your language of choice.

Using your mouse, select an appropriate language.

Raspbmc uses a time server to figure out the current time, but it can’t figure out your timezone automatically. So you’ll need to set this. The timezone setting isn’t in an obvious location. I actually spent a number of days staring at the wrong time, until I found the setting. You can find it setting under System->Appearance->International->Timezone.

If you’d like to tweak your video settings, you can make changes under System->Video Output. I’ve been using my own device at 1080p without any problems. But others have reported a significant performance boost in the UI by switching to 720p. I recommend trying to use your device at 1080p. That way if you decide to switch to 720p, you’ll at least be able to gauge the significance of the performance boost.

Audio settings can be changed under System->Audio Output. This was one of the settings that I struggled to get right. For a short while, I used the mini jack connected to a stereo input on my audio receiver. Nothing I changed resulted in good audio. After a little Googling, I discovered many, many Raspbmc users complaining of noisy audio over the mini jack. I don’t know if it’s a hardware issue or a driver issue, but something isn’t quite right. The best thing to do is to set your audio output to HDMI. You’ll probably need to experiment with the rest of the settings to find a configuration that works best for you. My TV is currently connected to my audio receiver in stereo using RCA cables. So I set my speaker configuration to 2.0 and turned on “Output stereo to all speakers”. I turned off the “boost volume level” because I didn’t want any other audio processing occurring on the Pi. This resulted in the best sounding audio for my setup. This may take some tweaking to find a configuration that works best for you.

If you have a remote control or a WiFi adapter, this is probably a good point in the process to get those working. Before plugging anything into the Pi, you should power it down. Using your mouse, click on the power button in the lower left hand corner of the screen and select “Power off System”. Once the device has shut down, you can safely unplug your keyboard and mouse and stick them back in the closet. Plug in your IR receiver and/or WiFi adapter and power the Pi back up by unplugging it and plugging it back in. If your devices are compatible with Raspbmc, they should be detected automatically.

And that’s it! Your Raspbmc device is ready for use.

Adding Media

By now you’re probably itching to get some media playing on your device so you can see Raspbmc in action. Let’s try adding one of the great classics – “Night of the Living Dead”.

What’s needed is a location that Raspbmc can use to source video content. This can be another hard drive, a shared drive from another computer, or even a location on the SD card plugged into the Pi. I have a FreeNAS box on our home network that offers up a CIFS share (AKA a Windows share) for content. So that’s what I’ll be using here to illustrate the process. But if you want to put content right on the SD card, the easiest way to do that is to upload it using FTP (Username: pi, Password: raspberry). If you decide to go this route, I hope you heeded my advice in part 2 about getting a class 10 card.

From the main menu, select “Video”. You’ll see a menu that lists three items – Files, Playlists, and Video Add-ons. Select “Files” and then on the next menu select “Add Videos…”. This will present you with the following dialog box.

Click on the “Browse” button and you’ll presented with another dialog box that looks like so.

The list on the right represents all of the different storage/streaming types that Raspbmc supports for video content. If you used FTP to upload content to the SD card, select “Home Folder” and navigate to the location where you uploaded your content. If you’re using a CIFS network share, like me, scroll down through the list until you find SMB shares. SMB is an older name for CIFS. From here you can point Raspbmc to the computer and folder containing the content.

You’ll notice that you can also specify the type of video content this location contains. This will allow you to tap into one of the neatest features in Raspbmc. By indicating that a given folder contains TV shows, for example, Raspbmc will use the Online TV Database to fetch all sorts of information on the shows contained in that folder. This includes ratings, synopsis, actors, and, best of all, fan art and posters which will be displayed in Raspbmc. A similar thing happens with movies, the data source being The Movie Database.

After you select the folder, Raspbmc will scan its content and download fanart for media it can find online. The video content will then appear in your library. Highlight a movie in the menu and you’ll see its fanart appear on the screen, assuming Raspbmc was able to find it online.

Regarding MPEG-2 (DVD video) and VC-1 content, media of these types aren’t playable on Raspbmc without the appropriate licenses. But both licenses are dirt cheap and can be purchased from the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Adding the licenses into Raspbmc can be done in Programs->Raspbmc Settings->System Configuration->Advanced System Settings.

I’m not going to bother to explain the process for adding photos or music as it’s pretty much the same as adding video. If you’ve successfully added video to your device, you should be able to just as easily add other types of content.

Conclusion

At this point, you know enough to get started with Raspbmc. But we’re not done yet. In part four, we’ll talk about some of the issues I encountered after using Raspbmc for a few days, along with some ideas and tricks to make your Raspbmc experience much more fun. In the meantime, explore Raspbmc. Try out some of the settings and add-ons. You can’t break anything. The worst that can happen is you’ll need to reinstall Raspbmc. And now you’re a pro at that. 🙂

Good luck!