Open Elec – Kody, formerly known as XBox Media Center
In the past I had a classic XBox that I had never played any game on. It was good hardware, and it had some great software XBMC (‘XBox Media Center’). The XBox is gone, but recently I bought a Raspberry Pi 2 B to see if XBMC that is recently renamed to Kodi is still that great. An easy way to intall Kody on the Raspberry Pi is by using Open Elec.
Installation
The installation is easy, in a future article I will write more about that. Basicly I just downloaded an image of Open Elec from their website and put that on the sdcard. On the first boot of the Raspberry Pi it needs a little bit of configuration for your timezone and keyboard-layout and that is all.
Very userfriendly
Kodi is easy to use, you can use an normal keyboard, but there are also special remotes on the market that you can use with the Raspberry Pi. Also it has lots of functionality, it can play local mediafiles (pictures, audio and video), but the real strength is in the addons. In an other post I will write more about the addons that I use personnally.
Problems with the Raspberry Pi?
The Raspberry Pi 2 B with Open Elec has lots of strengths as a mediaplayer, but it also has a few problems. One is sdcard corruption, a lot of people complain about the sdcard getting corrupt often. This is easy to fix, but not conveniant. It can be avoided by using tested sdcards (for example Sandisk). I was not that smart, but I avoid corruption by leaving the Raspberry Pi 2 B always on since corruption comes with shuting down and booting up. This is not a big problem, calculations show the Rasberry Pi uses about 2,50 euro a year on electricity of you play video a few hours a day and keep it iddle the rest of the time.
The Raspberry Pi 2 B is for sale on Amazon.
