Compared with computer, Raspberry Pi is small and a little complicated which is an extremely low power and ultra-compact (credit-card sized) computer board, you can connect the Raspberry Pi to PC with the HDMI or USB 2.0 ports, at the same time, Raspberry Pi provides the Base ethernet, SD Card socket (bootable and RAM.
Even though you can use the Raspberry Pi as a common PC, for home server enthusiasts, using it as a compact media player to play even 1080p videos is the cool thing. You need to install the reliable media player in it. In this posty, we will introduce 4 great media center software for Raspberry Pi and help you to play HD videos on Raspberry Pi easily.
No 1. Media Center Software for Raspberry Pi – OpenELEC
OpenElec was developed to allow Kodi to be used on platforms with relatively modest processing power. It is version of Kodi that runs under Linux, with all unnecessary parts of Linus stripped out to let Kodi run as fast as possible. In general, OpenElec media player is a great device that works very well and is attractively priced
Key Features:
- A full install is only 80-125MB
- Minimal hardware requirements
- Simple install to HDD, SSD, Compact Flash, SD card, pen drive or other
- Optimized builds for Atom, ION, Intel, Fusion and more
- Simple configuration through the XBMC interface
- Plug and Play external storage
No 2. Media Center Software for Raspberry Pi – Raspbmc
Raspbmc updates on July 2013 which is a minimal Linux distribution based on Debian that brings XBMC to your Raspberry Pi.Which brings XBMC and 1080p decoding to the 1st generation Apple TV. Raspbmc provides a Windows installer it is not best suited for over network (Wifi) installation.
Key Features:
- Free and open source
- Supports both wired and WiFi out of the box!
- Multiple languages supported
- No knowledge of Linux is needed
- Auto updating
- Supports 1080p playback
No 3. Media Center Software for Raspberry Pi – XBian
XBian is another excellent media center software for Raspberry Pi which a small, fast and lightweight media center distro, based on a minimal Raspbian image. Their focus is delivering the fastest XBMC solution for the Raspberry Pi. We list its main features as below:
Key Features:
- Fits on a 1GB SD card
- Low RAM usage and low CPU usage
- Very smooth UI
- Auto connect USB
- Support for AFP, NFS, AirPlay, CEC, Lirc, PVR
- User friendly configuration with xbian-config
No 4. Media Center Software for Raspberry Pi – GeeXbox
The forth media center software for Raspberry Pi is GeeXboX which is a free and Open Source Media-Center, you can instal it on the Linux OS. In fact, it’s a full-featured OS, that one can boot as a LiveCD, from a USB key, an SD/MMC card or install on its regular HDD.
Key Features:
- Open GL ES acceleration for XBMC
- 1080p HD video hardware decoding
- HDMI-CEC support
- AudioEngine with HD audio (DTS-MA and Dolby True-HD
- Live TV and PVR
Benefit: Playing HD Videos on Raspberry Pi
Most Media center software for Raspberry Pi can play the HD videos well. How to play the DVD and Blu-ray discs on Raspberry Pi with the HD video effect? You can try the Pavtube ByteCopy which is one of the best DVD ripping software and help users to remove DVD copy protection, like UOP, CSS, Region Codes, at the same time, you can get the HD MP4, AVI, WMV videos for playing on Raspberry Pi. At the same time, you can get the MP4 in H.264 video codec, this software takes full use of the GPU acceleration which you can get the 30x faster speed than other common DVD ripper.
Quick Guide: Playing DVD and Blu-ray on Raspberry Pi
1. Run the DVD to Raspberry Pi converter on your computer. Click “File” > “Load from Disc” to add DVD/Blu-ray discs, you also can drag the video to it directly or add the DVD and Blu-ray ISO image pr folder to it.
2. The 1080p H.264 HD video is the best video format for Raspberry Pi. You can choose the HD H.264 video from the Common Video or HD Video, you just need to click the Format button and open the output video list.
3. Click Convert button to start the video conversion.
