Raspbmc - final version released

14th of February 2013 by liz

News for all you media-player types from Sam Nazarko, the terrifyingly young developer of Raspbmc:

Although the Raspberry Pi’s real goal is education, its powerful GPU has made the device very popular amongst HTPC tinkerers and enthusiasts.

I’ve been working on Raspbmc for a year and am now happy to announce the final release and congratulate XBMC on such a remarkable new release. Raspbmc is a self-updating Linux distribution that brings XBMC to the Raspberry Pi with simple installation. It can be run off an SD card, USB drive or even an NFS share and fully supports WiFi out of the box.

Raspbmc comes with AirPlay, PVR, 1080p playback and much more. You can read more about what Raspbmc can do at www.raspbmc.com/about and be up and running in less than 20 minutes.

Sam’s got a little more to say about things Raspbmc in a post on his blog about this final version of the software. Nice one, Sam – thanks!

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38 comments

TheLini on
February 14, 2013 at 1:51 pm said:

Got this installed and running from an external USB Hard drive on a 512mb Pi

Its lightning,.. Absolutely superb..

Comment ↓
- Gav on
  February 14, 2013 at 4:52 pm said:
  
  I have it running on a 256MB Pi. Pulling Movies,Music and Pictures from a DLNA server (soon to be another Pi) combined with Yatse XBMC remote on my Android phone and/Or Nexus 7 makes a really useful system.
  
  Comment ↓
  - Ian on
    February 14, 2013 at 11:48 pm said:
    
    I have this exact same setup. Great minds…
    
    Comment ↓
Jimbo on
February 14, 2013 at 1:55 pm said:

Actually you don’t need the 512M one, it works just fine on a 256M one. Even for 1080p!

I pick up the programmes over the network. What do you use you external HDD for?

Comment ↓
- liz on
  February 14, 2013 at 1:58 pm said:
  
  I use it on a 256MB Pi too. Works a treat.
  
  Comment ↓
- TheLini on
  February 14, 2013 at 8:16 pm said:
  
  I have some issues with my wired networking, and have had some hassles streaming some of my files, so I have moved my library to the external HDD.. And I use my NAS as a back up for the video files (as well as backing up my mac)..
  
  I’ve found that playing the media from the HD makes the forward and rewind scan much much quicker than it was when streaming over my network.
  
  I may switch to my 256meg Pi if people say its no problem.
  
  BTW I am using iOS contellation on both my iphone and ipad to control it. Very very useful.
  
  Comment ↓
- TheLini on
  February 19, 2013 at 11:30 am said:
  
  I’ve switched over to my 256meg pi and there is a very slight decrease in UI smoothness, but its still fantastically responsive..
  
  I can now use my 512 pi as a linux box, and get it booting from an external HDD.. (thats another project.)
  
  Comment ↓
Philip Ashmore on
February 14, 2013 at 1:57 pm said:

Does “final version” mean that Raspbmc will be merged with Raspbian?

Comment ↓
- liz on
  February 14, 2013 at 2:01 pm said:
  
  We don’t want to promote one of the XBMCs over the others to the sort of degree that you’d see if we included it in the image – we may have a media centre section on the downloads page later on, though, when more of the options are mature.
  
  Comment ↓
  - pd on
    February 14, 2013 at 6:31 pm said:
    
    Does this mean that you will give XBian (and any other similar distros) equal mention when it hits version 1?
    
    Comment ↓
    - liz on
      February 14, 2013 at 6:55 pm said:
      
      Of course!
      
      Comment ↓
    - Montekuri on
      February 14, 2013 at 7:26 pm said:
      
      I would say not when it hits version 1.0.
      But whten it leaves the alpha stage.
      
      Comment ↓
- Pete Best on
  February 14, 2013 at 2:14 pm said:
  
  Nah, just final in that it’s stable and ready for everyone to use/enjoy. The smaller bugs and quirks that were on the older versions are a thing of the past with the final version. Sam is still going to keep updating it with the XBMC codebase and any firmware updates that come from the RaspberryPi guys
  
  Comment ↓
- Dave Rensberger on
  February 14, 2013 at 3:14 pm said:
  
  I’d love to see some sort of forum (whether in the “Downloads” sections of this page or somewhere else) for not just media centers, but any type of application-specific images that can be flashed directly onto the Pi’s SD card.
  
  Comment ↓
Tom on
February 14, 2013 at 2:04 pm said:

I tried an earlier Raspbmc (about 2 months ago) and although it works, there were some glitches. I had a windows share on another computer and after 15-20 minutes of 1080p playback through the wire ( mkv file I think) it freezes. I this a known problem maybe with Samba shares?

Comment ↓
- Dave Rensberger on
  February 14, 2013 at 3:00 pm said:
  
  Tom, I’ve been using it for the past 4 months or so primarily to stream 1080p MPEG-2 programs that I’ve recorded on an iMac with EyeTV over a Samba mount (through pi’s 10/100 Ethernet).
  
  The buffering can be a little bit slow, which makes fast-forward/rewind a little bit slow, but other than that, it works great. My daughter watches her hour-long Sesame Street episodes almost every evening and I’ve never seen it freeze.
  
  This is on one of the early 256MB Pi’s, BTW.
  
  Comment ↓
  - Tom on
    February 14, 2013 at 7:02 pm said:
    
    I have the early 256MB as well
    
    Mine were H.264/MPEG-4 .mkv files, so might require a bit more decoding than MPEG-2. As you said, it works great, but somehow after usually 20 minutes (give or take a bit) it starts lagging until it freezes. I would compare it to a paper jam, suddenly it gets into trouble, but the bits keep coming and it halts, requiring a reboot.
    
    I’ll try with the new version, see what happens!
    
    Comment ↓
    - jose on
      February 15, 2013 at 11:26 am said:
      
      i’ve seen this on my 256mb model too. luckily it does not happen too often.
      
      Comment ↓
ColinD on
February 14, 2013 at 2:51 pm said:

Wonderful news. Sam has clearly put an incredible amount of effort into this release. When I was quizzing him about Raspbmc in preparation for an article in The MagPi it was clear that he has a very thorough understanding of how to get the most out of a media player on the Pi.

Good job.

Comment ↓
Rene on
February 14, 2013 at 2:52 pm said:

Tom, the version 2 months ago cant really compare to the final version. A lot of things have happened in 2 months time regarsing maturing of both the Raspbmc and XBMC releases.

Comment ↓
- Tom on
  February 14, 2013 at 7:06 pm said:
  
  great! I will definitely check it out. It’s just you and me tonight for Valentine’s day, Rasp Pi !
  
  Comment ↓
- Tom on
  February 15, 2013 at 1:20 am said:
  
  I concur, the new version is way fast and responsive!
  
  Comment ↓
hsalonen on
February 14, 2013 at 3:03 pm said:

I would like recommend checking out XBian as well:
http://xbian.org/

It is actively developed alternative to RaspBMC.

Comment ↓
johnbanks on
February 14, 2013 at 3:47 pm said:

Good news today for Media Centre enthusiasts – Raspbmc final version has just been released.
All the more reason for an official Foundation announcement on their position on HD audio? – ability to passthrough DTS-MA and True-HD.
How about it, guys?

Comment ↓
Sergio on
February 14, 2013 at 4:27 pm said:

I have the Model B 1.0 (256MB) all my USB problems were solved with Raspbmc. I have a wifi dongle and a 500GB USB 3.0 hard drive, both connected to a powered USB hub, also the pi grabs it’s power from it. Transmission client and video playback from the USB without any issue.

Comment ↓
Jessie on
February 14, 2013 at 6:47 pm said:

This version is a huge step forward. There are very few movies that I have issues with now. Almost everything works flawlessly now.

Comment ↓
Matt Hawkins on
February 14, 2013 at 11:38 pm said:

Has anyone got CEC working with a Samsung TV? Previous versions worked fine. Also the “reboot” and “power off” options don’t seem to do anything. The installation was nice and smooth.

Comment ↓
- Tom on
  February 15, 2013 at 12:32 pm said:
  
  Do you mean that the TV remote control works as well to control the XBMC? I noticed the earlier versions could do that as well, and indeed now id doesn’t seem to work anymore. So can’t control the XBMC with my Samsung TV remote control (which was possible with the previous version)
  
  Comment ↓
  - edwinj85 on
    February 15, 2013 at 1:26 pm said:
    
    Wait, this is broken?
    
    Crap. I can’t really use it on my Samsung TV then – I only control the UI with my TV remote at the moment. I can sudo in and run omxplayer from the command line, but that is a massive hack that isn’t practical. My non technical girlfriend won’t be able to operate it like that either.
    
    Comment ↓
    - Tom on
      February 16, 2013 at 9:21 pm said:
      
      after some checking, turned out the “info” button still works. But the direction buttons don’t. I’m pretty sure they did in a previous version. It’s probably just a setting, but it worked “out of the box” before, so it’s a bit weird.
      
      This versions is definitely way better than earlier versions though, very responsive, really great. So it’s probably a matter of finding the right settings for this.
      
      Comment ↓
- Glasofruix on
  February 15, 2013 at 4:06 pm said:
  
  Works fine on my Samsung le32c530
  
  Comment ↓
Oysterville on
February 15, 2013 at 2:38 am said:

The nice thing about an open platform system is that it doesn’t require a “old-school tie club” to be successful. Create a better product, and the users will find you.

Comment ↓
Paul on
February 15, 2013 at 2:38 am said:

I have this running as well, but 1.0 doesn’t mean much in this case. The PVR part is pretty much broken and the CEC for some TVs as well, both used to work quite nice in earlier versions. Also shut down and restart, mentioned above
This might be related to some other contributing groups to the project, but as a user I look at the end product: Not as nice as it used to be and most important to me: I’m having serious problems concerning WAF.

Comment ↓
edwinj85 on
February 15, 2013 at 10:17 am said:

I’ve had this working on a 256MB and a 512MB model – never noticed the difference. The pi has an incredibly powerful GPU given the price.

Setting up Transmission ( a torrent client ) with a web interface and using samba works wonders with Raspbmc. I still wouldn’t recommend being evil with that sort of setup, but there are plenty of legal torrents to choose from.

Comment ↓
jeremy on
February 15, 2013 at 7:36 pm said:

I have been using the release candidates of Raspbmc and have loved it. EXCEPT now that I’ve upgraded to the release 1.0 version, the Youtube extension does not seem to be working. The search functionality works but when I click on video to watch, I get an error “playback failed Can’t locate URL” Anybody have any suggestions? I’ve tried uninstalling, re-installing, and rebooting…..Now I can’t watch Transformers Prime on my big screen (sad face).

Comment ↓
- ActionA on
  February 15, 2013 at 9:23 pm said:
  
  http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?pid=1335099
  
  have a look, the issue is not Raspbmc but the youtube addon
  
  Comment ↓
  - jeremy on
    February 15, 2013 at 11:55 pm said:
    
    thanks so much! will try one or both of the fixes presented on the link you provided. Am fairly confident it will resolve my issues.
    
    Comment ↓
Dwight on
February 23, 2013 at 5:43 am said:

IR Remote control could NOT be easier.
So I connected my RASPBMC to my Samsung TV and the TV remote also controls the RASPBMC straight away!!! No setup required!!

Oh Yea I forgot to mention the connection was via HDMI cable so the Remote commands are being fed back to the RASPBMC via HDMI

Three cheers to the builders of the RASPBMC and the Raspberry Pi

Comment ↓

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