My ‘Cheapest Awesome Media Centre Ever!‘ post introduced readers to the potential of a basic Raspberry Pi running a comprehensive little media centre. This post will help you installing the appropriate software on a MicroSD card to boot up your Raspberry Pi directly in Kodi media center mode.
What is Kodi?
“Kodi® (formerly known as XBMC™) is an award-winning free and open source software media center for playing videos, music, pictures, games, and more. Kodi runs on Linux, OS X, Windows, iOS and Android, featuring a 10-foot user interface for use with televisions and remote controls. It allows users to play and view most videos, music, podcasts and other digital media files from local and network storage media and the internet.”
Now there are many ways to run Kodi, even if you only look at the possibilities of running it on a Raspberry Pi. If you are apparently brave you can even install it on Raspbian and run it as a separate program (that actually sounds like a good idea to get more functionality out of your media centre…), but more on that later. For the purpose of this article I’m going to help you install Kodi running either from the XBian or OpenELEC operating system. I will also be using Windows to prepare the installations.
XBian Vs. OpenELEC
Both Xbian and OpenELEC are free Linux based operating systems only running Kodi.
Xbian is a small, fast and lightweight operating system for the Raspberry Pi and some other devices. It is very easy to install. It is based on a minimal Debian build.
OpenELEC on the other hand is build on “just enough operating system” or JeOS, making it a little smaller and faster, but quite limited to only the functions and abilities Kodi offers.
I personally prefer the OpenELEC version.
Apart from the 8 Things You’ll Need For Your First Raspberry Pi Build you will also need the following:
- An erased/clean/new 2GB (or bigger is better) MicroSD card – make sure it’s a fast one!
- (Hopefully a fast) internet connection
- Either the appropriate XBian installer or OpenELEC image file
- If you’re going to install the OpenELEC version you’ll also need Win32DiskImager and an compression utility such as WinZip
After having all these ready, let’s start.
The OpenELEC Installation Process
The OpenELEC installation process is very similar to the one used to install most other operating systems to a MicoSD (also see Basics of Installing an Operating System to a Raspberry Pi).
The compressed .img file is about 100 Mb.
Uncompress the .img file to a known location (now about 300 Mb)
Mount the SD card to your computer and run Win32DiskImager.
Double check the drive letter of your SD Card reader!
Browse to the .img file you want to install, make sure the correct drive letter is selected and use the Write option.
Appropriately remove the SD card and plug it into you Raspberry Pi.
Upon the first bootup, OpenELEC will guide you through setting up Kodi on your Raspberry Pi.
The XBian Installation Process
Mount the SD card to your computer and run the XBian installer.
Select the version of your Raspberry Pi and the drive letter your SD card was mounted on.
The XBian installer will now check for the latest stable image file and download it if it doesn’t exist.
The .img file is about 300 Mb, so this can take a while…
After the file is downloaded the XBian installer will ask you to confirm to erase existing data on the memory card.
Appropriately remove the SD card and plug it into you Raspberry Pi where the installation process will complete automatically (more time…).
Upon the first bootup, XBian will guide you through setting up Kodi on your Raspberry Pi.
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