First off, I'd like to welcome you to this title. By the end of this book, you will be able to set up a comprehensive media center that will serve you well for years to come. Each chapter will guide you through the basics so that by the end of the book we will have gone from a basic system to a comprehensive and complex one that meets your needs.
In this chapter, we will cover the following:
- Why Raspberry Pi is a good hardware choice to be used as a media center
- The equipment needed to build a Raspberry Pi based media center
- What Raspbmc is, and what it can do
- Installing Raspbmc onto an SD card using Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux
- Booting up Raspberry Pi to complete the installation
The Raspberry Pi is a small, credit card sized computer launched in 2012 for the purpose of rekindling a dwindling interest in Computer Science. The device therefore had to be affordable, have a low power consumption, and a small form factor. These characteristics are also what make the Raspberry Pi such an appealing solution as a media center. The Raspberry Pi is silent, and a quiet system is essential for an ideal media center experience. The Raspberry Pi may seem like a low performance device for education, however it has HDMI output. Its Ethernet capabilities and powerful GPU capable of decoding full HD videos has attracted much attention. Furthermore, as the operating system runs on an external SD card, a type of memory card, the device itself cannot be bricked, and can always be restored to a working state by reinstalling Raspbmc.