I have two daughters aged 3 and 7 and this allows me to play with many wonderful things. If you asked me in the early part of my IT career if you will have a computer smaller than a cigarette pack running all of your media centre functionality I would've laughed.
Well it's true, and very easy to set up. To top it all it is only around $35 if you buy on a special. I my home we have most of the gadgets for the kids. We have Satellite TV, mostly for the sport as I am a huge sports supporter. We have Netflix, we have Showmax, which is an African version of Netflix, with some local shows which you do not get on Netflix. We run Netflix through the Xbox One, but also have an XBOX 360 as the games for the Kinect is much better than the Xbox One.
The problem is that not everything we want to watch is on Netflix, Showmax or the Satellite TV, I am speaking about the older movies and series. So I ventured off to the shops to buy a Rasberry Pi 3 to install Kodi - Media Centre (The old XBMC), which allows you to stream older series and movies. What makes Rasberry Pi really cool is that you can install basically any operating system that can fit on a Micro Sim. And even cooler is that there is pre-packaged ISO's with a wide variety of things. If you are looking for the older games, you can download a pre-loaded MAME emulator, which makes your Pi a retro gaming machine.
LibreELEC - Just Enough Operating System for Kodi
For now I decided to install LibreElec, which is a very small little operating system which auto boots Kodi (Krypton) as you start up which allows you to plug it straight into you television as a media centre. This is a very easy download and install and you can do it in less than 15 minutes.
Use the following site for installation instructions:
How to install LibreElec on Rasberry Pi 1 2 or 3
All you need i to download the LibreElec ISO install file and extract to the Micro SD. From there you need to install the Exodus Add On and you can watch basically any Series or Movie.
Here is the Exodus add-on setup video:
libreelec install exodus
Video Source
PiPlay (Beta)
This is a great download as it gives you various gaming emulators on the same box.
MAME - AdvanceMAME & MAME4ALL
CPS I / CPS II - Final Burn Alpha
Neo Geo - GNGeo
Playstation - pcsx-reARMed
Genesis - DGen
SNES - SNES9x
NES - AdvMESS
Gameboy - Gearboy
Gameboy Advance - GPSP
ScummVM
Atari 2600 - Stella
Cavestory - NXEngine
Commodore 64 - VICE
I just love my new Rasberri Pi 3 as it is also wireless and connects directly to your network. I will definitely use to automate various things in the house. There is so many add-on components which you can buy, that it will keep me busy for quite some time.
Happy Steeming!
