Mastering Media with the Raspberry Pi

Media Centers, Music, High End Audio, Video, and Ultimate Movie Nights

Ralph Roberts

Alexander, North Carolina, USA

Any source code or other supplementary material referenced by the author in this book is available to readers on GitHub via the book's product page, located at http://www.apress.com/us/book/9781484227275 . For more detailed information, please visit http://www.apress.com/source-code .

ISBN 978-1-4842-2727-5

e-ISBN 978-1-4842-2728-2

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-2728-2

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017957568

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Introduction

A smile is the best form of introduction.

Opening with a smile here because I always write the Introduction to my books last and, gee, I'm glad to see all of you. The book is done and now in your hands. Thanks.

This book's all about entertainment and the best, least expensive way for you to achieve a smart home entertainment center. We begin by looking at the most computing bang for the buck currently in the known universe, the Raspberry Pi single-card computer. At $35 suggested retail, it’s inexpensive enough to embed and dedicate one to your media center. You'll need some good software to run on it, and this book shows which and how to install and configure it.

But what other cost will we incur? Well, very little. The entertainment center software is open source (free), and it’s assumed you already have a TV, maybe a DVD or Blu-ray player, and the other items like cables, a mouse and keyboard needed to run the brains of your new media center, possibly an external hard drive for media storage, and certainly at least two microSD cards (one of use and the other as a backup). I’ll go over all that for you in the appropriate chapters.

For this minor investment, you’ll get a lot of return in sheer entertainment value. Having your movie and music collections categorized in easily accessible databases, access to millions of media goodies on the vastness of the Internet, all sorts of add-ons to add features and customize to your heart’s content, you will (really will) love all the freedom and power an intelligent media center using software specifically designed for that purpose gives you.

You’ll find the software we’ll be using to be chock-full of features already. The purpose of the book is not to explain every single feature; that would up its size by a city block or so. Instead, it gives you what you need for hooking up and running a media center. By the end of the book, you’ll not only have a sophisticated, very much working home theater but have gotten a good feel for how the software and hardware works. Most importantly, you’ll be in a great position to continue maintaining and expanding your system while maximizing your viewing and listening time.

Entertainment, you see, is all about being entertained and less about work.

Now, let us entertain ourselves in setting up the ways of doing just that.

Contents at a Glance

About the Author and About the Technical Reviewer

About the Author

Ralph Roberts is a long-time writer with over 100 books published and more than 20 million words sold professionally (mostly about computers) and the publisher of about 1,000 titles through his own publishing company. He’s recently written extensively about the Raspberry Pi—directly coauthoring a book with Eben Upton, founder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation—including thousands of words about its sound and video features. Additionally, he has decades of experience in sound and video, having produced hundreds of hours of TV shows and documentaries. He also owned a small chain of stereo stores and held certification from the Society of Audio Consultants.

About the Technical Reviewer

Martin V. Minner is a technology publishing consultant and historian. He has a Ph.D. from Indiana University and an M.A. from the University of North Carolina. Marty’s home is in Bloomington, Indiana, but he lives at the intersection of technology and the humanities. He’s on Twitter as @MVMinner.

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Table of Contents for Frontmatter

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