Guest Blogger Plays Movies on Raspberry Pi

Follow my 11-year Old Adventures with my Raspberry Pi

Below is a guest blog from my dad when he hijacked my RPi for the evening

“I wanted to see what else this device was capable of so I tried a few things.  One of them worked out.  I couldn’t set up webiopi to control the GPIO pins via the internet, so I moved on to installing XBMC.  I read about 10 tutorials that all sounded highly complicated and I almost scrapped the idea.  They all talked about how difficult the configuration was, how difficult it was to get sound, and how hard it was to buy and install codecs.  Then, I watched a jittery youtube video (get a tripod!) and decided to give it a shot.  Turns out that it was INCREDIBLY easy.

To summarize the entire process, I flashed a card with the openELEC image, converted the video to mpeg-2 and put it on a flash drive, and connected it to a TV.  That’s it!  I’ll give more details below.

First thing to do is download the openELEC image.  There are others out there, but this is the one I chose.  Here’s where I got my image: http://sparky0815.de/openelec-download-images-fat-files/.  I had an 8 Gb memory card, so I scrolled down to the 8GB Image section and downloaded the 2012-11-07.

Then, I used the free win32diskimager (http://www.techspot.com/downloads/5361-win32-disk-imager.html) to burn the image onto a memory card.  Make sure that you remove everything important on the card because it will be formatted.  You might want to format it first in FAT32, but I didn’t and it worked fine.

Without purchasing codecs, the RPi can only play h.264 videos, but fortunately, there is free software that will convert just about any format you have into h.264 (mp4).  The software is called HandBrake (http://handbrake.fr/downloads.php) and is great for a variety of other video tasks as well.

Now, just put the converted videos onto a flash drive and you’re ready to go.  Pop the imaged memory card into the Raspberry Pi and boot it up.  That’s it!  Once booted, just show the openELEC software where you stored the videos and they’ll play in HD with great sound.  And if you already had the RPi and a memory card laying around, then you didn’t spend a penny to do it!

Here’s the bouncy youtube video that helped get me started: