#RPI MEDIA CENTER HOW TO#
#RPI MEDIA CENTER INSTALL#
#RPI MEDIA CENTER UPGRADE#

#RPI MEDIA CENTER INSTALL#

I’ve chosen the Raspberry Pi OS Lite version as this intended to be a headless install - that is to say that it won’t have a graphical user interface and won’t be connected to a display - therefore installing those modules adds unnecessary bloat to the OS install, uses more space and introduces more risks in terms of security vulnerabilites.

#RPI MEDIA CENTER HOW TO#

There is also an official video of how to use the installer. When you download and run the imager, you’ll see a dialog as below: Insert the MicroSD card into your PC or Laptop using either a card reader or a USB adapter. I’ve opted to use Raspberry Pi OS (formerly Raspbian) using the provided imager too (URL has instructions). However, I will cover the initial setup of the Operating System on the included MicroSD card. I’m not going to go into an unboxing and hardware build guide - the instructions with the kit were pretty straightforward. One other addition, unplanned, was an RSHTECH Powered USB Hub - I will explain more in a later post in this series why it was needed.

I’m not running software RAID - a Pi is a little under powered for that, but I do have regularly scheduled rsync runs to mirror files from primary drive to secondary drive and that meets my needs.

#RPI MEDIA CENTER UPGRADE#

In the end, I opted for the CanaKit Raspberry Pi 4 Starter Kit (8GB RAM / 64GB SD) and an upgrade in storage capacity from my 2x 1TB laptop internal SATA drives to 2x WD 2 TB Elements Portable External Hard Drive - USB 3.0.

Knowing that my old Pi could run a little hot, I also wanted a case with a fan. My 3B had done incredibly well with its’ 1.2Ghz Quad Core SoC and 1GB Ram but I wanted to boost performance and future proof as much as possible, so I went with the 4B+ with 8GB Ram. My old Pi was getting a little slow for some tasks, but the main reason was that my external hard drives (mounted via an external 2 drive USB dock) were starting to experience more frequent errors and as I was going to replace them with bigger drives I thought, why not upgrade the Pi hardware too? What hardware did you opt for?įor my Raspberry Pi, I decided to I wanted to give it as much oomph as possible. To the latter point, if you’ve been reading my blog for a while you’ll know that for a few years my Pi 3B+ also ran Motion to perform motion detection and alerting for my IP cameras.

A lab for me to mess around with linux and.

Stream media over UPNP to my TVs, iPhones and iPad.

Act as a performant and resilient fileserver for my Windows client devices.

My experience with my previous NASPi is that it is more than capable for my needs, which I can summarise as:

When I first done this on my Raspberry Pi 3B, I was frustrated by limitations (lack of features, customisation) of my Western Digital WD MyBook Live.

I recently replaced my Raspberry Pi 3B+ NAS/Media Centre with a Raspberry Pi 4B+ and it occurred to me that others may want to do likewise, so here goes.

Rpi media center