You can quickly build your own media center with little hardware. For this we tried the distributions LibreELEC, OSMC, XBian and Max2Play.
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21 mins
In pocket save on computer
Over the years, numerous media tend to accumulate on our computers, external data carriers or servers. Wedding photos, videos from past vacations, digitized music or recorded films are somewhere (literally or quite real) in the drawer and are gradually being forgotten. You could also use a media center to bring them to new life, reminisce or just enjoy the comfort of a well-arranged collection – from the comfort of your sofa and always ready to hand.
A flexible and compact solution for such a project is the Raspberry Pi, which can be loaded with its treasures either directly or via the network. Luckily, there are already a good handful of distributions – i.e. complete operating system images – especially for this purpose, which should make it easier to get started, so that you don’t have to start from scratch.
Among the most popular LibreELEC, OSMC, XBian and Max2Play. on one Raspberry Pi 4B (4GB) we went through the first steps once. This article shows what similarities and differences we found, what is suitable for which needs and what makes it easier to get started.
