The Raspberry Pi 2B is a $35 single board
computer that makes a great media streaming
box for your big screen TV.
Simply install Plex Media Server on a spare
PC loaded with movies and attach a Pi to every
TV in your home for a true multi-room media solution.
Although it only uses around 2 watts of power
and it's literally the size of a credit card,
here it is alongside my New York City subway card to prove that, it's got a lot of features packed in.
So what do you get for your $35? Quite a lot actually...
You get a quad core ARM CPU running at 900
MHz with a built in GPU that has hardware
accelerated h.264 decoding and 1GB of RAM.
There are 17 GPIO pins for connecting the
Pi to various sensors or other electronic
components and even a connector for a miniature camera
board if you fancy building your own security camera.
Four USB 2.0 ports for connecting a keyboard,
mouse, Wi-Fi dongle or additional storage.
One 10/100 Ethernet port, it's not gig ethernet
becaue it's connected via the built-in USB
hub and USB 2.0 just isn't up to it.
A 3.5mm headphone jack that outputs composite
video as well as stereo audio.
A full size HDMI port that can output 1080p
at 60Hz and a Micro USB port that is used
to provide power to the Pi.
Main storage for the OS is a micro SD card
slot underneath.
If you think the Pi looks rather unfinished
as it's a bare circuit board, you're right,
for a fully working system you need a few
other items. But most people will have the
majority of these lying around.
The first thing you'll want to buy is a case.
These vary in price from under $5 to upwards
of $30. This particular one was around $6
from Amazon.
You'll also need a USB charger with a micro
USB connector, the kind you get included with
most smartphones these days.
It needs to be a good quality one, I'd recommend
a 2 Amp (or 10 Watt) unit, with a good thick powercable. A thin cable can cause the voltage to drop.
You'll also need a micro SD card for the OS.
It needs to be at least 4 GB in size, but
as always, the larger the better. And remember,
this is the main storage for the Pi, so get
a fast one, a class 10 card is recommended.
A low capacity card from a quality brand like
Sandisk can cost as little as $5 online. This
32 GB version was under $15.
You'll need to use another computer to actually
install the Pi's OS onto the card, so you'll
probably need a micro SD to SD adapter.
And if your computer doesn't have a built
in card reader, some sort of USB one.
You can pick up all these items for less than
$25 if you need to.
Oh, and you'll need some way of controlling
the Pi from your couch. You can use the Plex
app for your smartphone, buy a small infra-red
remote and USB receiver, or just use a small
USB wireless keyboard with a USB dongle, which
is what I do.
To install the Plex Media Player software
on the Pi we're going to download a package
called RasPlex.
RasPlex contains the OS and the Plex software
pre-installed, so head over to www.rasplex.com
where they have installers for Windows, Mac
and Linux.
I'm using my Windows PC for this video so
I'll download the Windows client.
Run the downloaded software and simply tell
it which Raspberry Pi you have, in my case
the Raspberry Pi 2, and pick which version
of RasPlex you want to install. 1.0.2 was
released this morning, but I'll install 1.0.1
for the purpose of this video.
If you haven't already downloaded the OS image
file the installer will do it for you.
Just press "download", tell it where to save
it, and a few seconds later, we're golden.
I haven't plugged my SD card into the computer
yet, but the installer can see my drive E:
which is the card reader.
I'll just plug the card in, wait for Windows
to see it, then press the "refresh" button
on the right, and now it can see my 32 GB
card. So I just click "Write SD card" and
wait for it to do its job.
OK, now it's finished, I'll eject the card,
put it in the slot on the underside of the
PI, put the pi in the case and then plug in
the HDMI cable, the ethernet cable and the
keyboard. Don't plug the power cable in until
everything else is ready as the Pi will immediately
try and boot as it hs no on/off switch.
The first thing RasPlex does on booting is
resize the SD card's disk partition to use
the full space available on the card, then
it'll reboot.
And now we just run through the installer
by hitting "next".
The first thing we need to do is make sure
the Pi's on the network, which it is, so we
hit "next" again.
If I choose "Do Calibrate" here, we can use
the arrow keys to set where the top left corner
should be, followed by the lower right and
how high up we'd like our subtitles to be.
Just press "escape" when you're done. If you
have the Pi plugged in to your TV this is
worth doing as most TV's use something called
overscan where they stretch the picture past
the borders of the screen, cutting off the
edges of the picture.
Now we log the Pi into the MyPlex website.
This is optional, you can just manually enter
in your Plex servers IP address, but I think
MyPlex is a great service as it lets me see
the Plex servers of my friends and stream
movies from them. So I'm going to log in here.
I also need to login to MyPlex on my PC as
well and then go to myplex.tv/pin and enter
these digits there which will automatically
log the Pi in. All done.
So the final step is to run the pre-caching
option. Pre-caching lets the Pi download all
the movie artwork thumbnails from your server
in order to speed up the user interface when
you're scrolling through your movie collection.
I highly recommend doing it, it makes Plex
much more pleasant to use on the Pi. It'll take a few minutes to run so I'll just cut to the end here.
And then from here on in it's standard Plex
stuff...
You can scroll through a whole screen of thumbnails
fairly quickly, certainly much more responsive
than the app on my Smart TV.
Let's take a look at the documentaries section and here play one, just so you can see the performance...
This is a 720p file, but the experience in
1080p is just as smooth.
So there you go, probably the cheapest way
to get Plex onto your TV both in terms of
upfront cost and electricity consumption.
It's just one practical use for this impressive
little machine.
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