XBMC on the Raspberry Pi

2014-06-14

To install the media center XBMC on a Raspbian-based system, I followed the instructions from a forum thread. First, as XBMC is not in the standard Raspbian repositories, I added the repo by Michael Gorven. Michael describes the procedure in a blog post. To add his repo, create the file /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mene.list with contents:

deb http://archive.mene.za.net/raspbian wheezy contrib

Michael also maintains an unstable branch with development versions of XBMC. To get development versions of XBMC rather than the stable versions, replace contrib with unstable in meme.list. The following commands import the repo signing key, and install XBMC:

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-key 5243CDED
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install xbmc

These steps were enough to get XBMC installed. Michael's post contains more instructions which may have to be executed, depending on the system setup. To execute XBMC from the EmulationStation menu, add the following lines to /home/pi/.emulationstation/es_systems.cfg:

DESCNAME=Applications
NAME=apps
PATH=/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/apps
EXTENSION=.sh
COMMAND=/home/pi/RetroPie/supplementary/runcommand/runcommand.sh 2 "%ROM%"

Moreover, create a shell script /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/apps/xbmc.sh which launches XBMC:

#!/bin/sh
xbmc -fs --standalone

If you just need a lightweight system with XBMC but no console game emulators, check out OpenELEC. Dean Vaughan explains how to get game emulators running on OpenELEC.

Fabian's Lines of Thought

XBMC on the Raspberry Pi

2014-06-14