iplayer – Kimondo

I wrote a post a while back about installing Sam Nazarko’s Raspberry Pi flavoured XBMC – Raspbmc, but now things have moved on a bit, rendering my original instructions out of date. Updated update: RaspBMC is now available as part of the NOOBS installer.

Sam has now released the final release version of Raspbmc so I thought I’d give it a go.

My criteria in trying this out is, is this something I could use everyday and is this something I could set up for an older relative and just leave in place…

The updated release version of Raspmbc now has a very easy to use installer, and is really simple to get running. Just prepare your SD card using the appropriate installer (I’ve been using the Mac version) pop it into your Raspberry Pi (ensuring it has an ethernet connection) switch on the power and then go and have a cup of tea.

Everything’s lovely and smooth – the menus work slickly, and the behind the scenes hard work on Raspbmc has really paid off. It behaves like a commercial product, and although it does pause occasionally it’s still far superior to the bundled apps that come with a lot of (often very expensive) smart TVs.

It also works well on a Motorola Lapdock (adjusting the screen size automatically from the HDMI monitor I originally installed it on).

In face you often have to remind yourself that this is running off a $25 computer.

Once you’ve got it running adding WiFi is nice and straightforward – I’ve been using the Edimax EW-7711UAN 150Mbps Wireless adapter which is detected and works with my BT hub without any issues. You just need to enter your network SSID and login using the Raspbmc settings option which is under programs.

Installing iPlayer on RaspBMC

Youtube and Vimeo plugins can be found in the ‘add plugins’ section and work out of the box.

To add iplayer – possibly the main thing I use my streaming box for these days there are a few additional steps (for just iplayer follow the step by step guide see this blog)

You’ll need to add some additional repositories –

There’s actually a handy plugin which automates the addition of new repositories, so we’ll install that first.

With the Raspberry Pi connected to the internet:

Home Screen to Settings > System Information. You need to locate and take note of your Pi’s IP address – this usually starts with 192.168.1.(then a number)

Next on another computer, you’ll need to connect via SSH – on a Mac or Linux PC open the console and use:

ssh pi@(your IP address)

the standard password is raspberry. Select yes and enter your locale details in the menus that appear – this will then end up with a [email protected] prompt.

On a PC you’ll need an SSH tool like PuttY

Copy and paste the following into your terminal window:

get http://passion-xbmc.org/addons/Download.php/plugin.program.repo.installer/plugin.program.repo.installer-1.0.5.zip

Then back on the pi go to system -> addons (in XBMC backspace moves up through sub-menus, so you might have to hit this a few times to find the top menu) and select install from zip file option.

Select homefolder and then plugin.program.repo.installer-1.9.5.zip

you should get a little message in the bottom right hand corner to say it’s been installed.

then select the programs icon and run the Repositories Installer

There’s a long list – iplayer can be found in Hitchers Repo, 4OD in the Mossy repo. Once this is installed you can navigate to system – settings – add-ons to install, and then video- Add-ons to watch.

For much more – including things like setting this up for airplay, using an ipad as a remote – and to support this excellent project – check out Sam Nazarko’s book for more info: Raspberry Pi Media Center

I must admit to being a bit of a fan for the Asus eeePC. I have a black 701 model which I impulse bought after the price hit £150, and i’ve found it to be a really superb machine.

Although the default Xandros boots up very quickly and is handy for checking emails on the fly, I eventually installed Ubuntu eee onto a removable SD card. It took me a while to work out how to get it to work, so I’ve added some instructions to the Ubuntu eee wiki to make the process easier.

I remember when I first got my eee one of my friends commented on using it to watch BBC’s iplayer – now one of the most popular ways to watch telly in the UK. However when I tried the video was very choppy – and only worked when not running in the full screen mode.

Initially I put this down to the eee’s fairly paltry celeron processor – at 600 mhz it’s fine for a simple bit of web surfing and word processing, but for anything more taxing it’s a bit underpowered, so I assumed that full screen video was beyond the reach of the eee. However after a bit of digging I found a discussion of Linux v Windows on the eee Forum here, which indicates that it a problem with the firefox / linux flash plugin. Rather than install Windows XP – which once i’d spent additional money on buying anti virus would be almost as much as I spent on the machine itself, I wanted to find an open source way of getting round the problem.

I’ve been running XBMC (X Box Media Centre) on my old modded xbox for some time now – hooked up to a telly it makes a handy way of watching DVDs, online media and networked media off a NAS drive. Given that XBMC works flawlessly off a machine with 64megs of ram and eeePC should be no problem.

So a visit to http://xbmc.org/ later and an install I got xbmc working – and it works really well.

Note that there are a few steps to go through rather than rely on Ubuntu’s built in add new software tool – you have to add the sources to the software sources control panel:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/team-xbmc-gutsy/ubuntu gutsy main

deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/team-xbmc-gutsy/ubuntu gutsy main

then type the following into the terminal application:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install xbmc

but once I’d got that over with XBMC appeared in the applications folder like normal.

Next step is to install the iplayer plugin:

See http://code.google.com/p/xbmc-iplayer/

The iplayer plugin works by using the BBC stream intended for ipod / iphone users .

(See comment below) The iplayer plugin uses the same streams as the Flash interface on the iPlayer website, in all it’s VP6 quality (higher-res than the iPhone stream), and with future improvements to the XBMC RTMP client, may also be able to stream the high-quality H264 streams also offered via the Flash interface instead.

Which explains why it looks better on the eeepc than on my iphone.

And I can report that it works in full screen no problem with the eee. Which makes the possibility of the eee becomming a handy ultra portable media centre. There are a few issues – very occasionally it freezes after watching a programme, and it doesn’t work smoothly with compiz, but these are really minor – the more I play with XBMC the more it impresses me.