Will the RBPi do everything I need it to do?

[darcNL]

Hello everyone, I'm new here. I hope this is okay to post here. I have been doing a lot of reading about the Raspberry Pi, but I'm still unsure if it will do everything I need it to do, and therefore am unsure if I should even buy one (although it's tempting just for the fun of it).

I need a media center, but more than what OSMC (XBMC) seems to be able to do. There are so many different types of OS's for the Pi, that's it's overwhelming.

Can the Raspberry Pi connect to my home network (3 separate machines - WinXP, Win7 & Win8.1), access & manage files, unrar, and also play various types of media in high definition?

From what I can tell, it seems the media playing capabilities would all be from OSMC/XBMC, and the file management side would come from Raspbian (or maybe many other different OS's). Is there any that would do both?

The unrar feature is questionable at best from what I've read. Still trying to work on a auto-unrar solution on the PC end of my network so the Pi wouldn't have to worry about it - but my research keeps coming up short there too.

Thank you for any help!

Darrell.

[jamesh]

XBMC is media player software running on Linux, which handles all the filesystems etc.

I use OpenELEC (a XBMC all ni noe solution) to playback from multiple sources on my home network, wirelessly. It can also act as a hotspot, so other devices can connect to it wirelessly when out in camper van.

Why do you need to unrar? Clearly Linux can have unrar installed, not sure how you would access it from XBMC, but I am sure it would be possible. Are your media files compressed using RAR or something and you need to unrar in realtime? Sounds odd - raring something like H264 would not result in much if any improvement in compression (H264 is already heavily compressed)

[r3d4]

> unrar ( or any other compression / de-compression ) will be slow and use alot of (cpu)resources ! but should work .

[ShiftPlusOne]

If you want to use the pi primarily as a desktop, use raspbian and omxplayer. If you need it to be predominantly a media centre, use raspbmc. If you only need it to be a media centre, use openelec.

[darcNL]

Thank you!

I just ordered m RPi B+

I'm thinking raspbian is what I'm going to need, but I'll try openelec and raspbmc and see what it does.

Thanks again - very excited.

[riklaunim]

There are also Android HDMI dongles that can work as a multimedia players and they can play movies/music from other computers in local network using DLNA/Miracast (those services can also work on RPi).