Installing and setting up a media center on Pi

The media center software we've chosen for the purpose of this project is Kodi, formerly known as XBMC. It is open source and widely used with lots of add-ons.

As usual, we will start by installing the necessary software on our Pi using the apt-get command:

sudo apt-get install kodi

Then, we'll run the kodi-standalone executable, which will start Kodi and show its user interface on the HDMI port of the Pi. It is, therefore, important that you connect the Pi to a screen using the HDMI port instead of a remote desktop to see Kodi's user interface. Now, you can connect a USB keyboard or mouse to navigate inside Kodi.

Starting Kodi on boot

We definitely do not want to run a command to start the media center, no matter how easy it is to run commands from Android, as discussed in previous chapters. For this reason, we need to start the command on startup using the crontab -e command. Add the following line at the end of the file the crontab...