Basic Setup

What you will need:

  1. Raspberry Pi 
  2. Flash SD Card
  3. USB Flash drive 8Gb+ (optional but highly recommended)
  4. PC with an SD Card reader
  5. HDMI cable
  6. Network cable or compatible wi-fi dongle (wifi recommended)
  7. USB mouse/keyboard for initial setup.
I suggest installing Raspbmc to a USB flash drive because this results in a quicker UI experience. Raspbmc does work running solely from the SD card but there is a notceable lag in menu commands

Setup Instructions

  1. Download the installer from http://www.raspbmc.com/download/
  2. Insert the SD card into your reader and run the installer program.
  3. Once the installation has finished, remvoe the SD Card and pllug it into the Raspberry Pi
  4. If you have opted to install to USB, plug the USB stick into the Raspberry Pi
  5. Power on the Pi
  6. The Pi will connect and download the latest version of RaspBMC. this will take some time so have a coffee or something

Configure Network

  1. By default, RaspBMC is set for a wired network using DHCP to automatically assign an IP address. I would recommend using a static IP address to make things easier later on.
  2. Go to Programs>RaspBMC Settings
  3. Go to Network Configuration
  4. Enter yourt network settings (IP address, subnet mask, gateway & DNS)
  5. You can also set up the wireless connection here if you are using a wi-fi dongle

Configuring Media Stores

Configuring the Media Stores is relatively painless, if a bit on the slow side and it does require some preparation of your files.
I have my files in two locations. I have an old 320Gb USB drive connected to my router (a Cisco WAG320N) it doesn't have the fastest access times but it is acceptable for streaming video and I have all my Doctor Who episodes (classic & new) stored here
I have a newer Buffalo 2Tb USB drive connected via a Samba share to a linux box I am using as my web and email server. This drive stores all my movies, music and TV shows in seperate directories.
It is recommended to use an NFS share rather than Samba for quicker access times, but that cna be a bit of a pain to configure. Samba, although slower, is much easier to set up and configure

Preparation

You will need to have a defined standard for your stores. in the case of TV shows I have the directory structure as follows:
TVShows\<show name>\<series number>\<episode number>-<episode title>.
For Example:
TVShows\Doctor Who (2005)\Series 1\ Doctor Who(2005) - 1x01 - Rose
If, like me, when you start your files are in a mix of naming conventions, a handy tool for renaming your files can be found here:
http://www.addictivetips.com/windows-tips/name-my-tv-series-cross-platform-program-to-quickly-rename-episodes/

For movies, it is a simple case of making sure the files are named (and spelled!) correctly

Adding Files

You should now be ready to add your files ot the media store.
  1. Navigate to Video
  2. Select 'Files'
  3. Select 'Add Source'
  4. Click 'Browse'
  5. Select what kind of source to look in (e.g. Samba share for a windows network location, NFS shares etc)
  6. Navigate to where your files are stored and select OK.
  7. You can add different locations to a single store if you have them spread across different drives  by selecting 'Add' and a new location box will open and you can browse to the directory there.
  8. When you have finished adding your stores, give the store a name and click OK
  9. You can now select what kind of media is in the store you specified. This defines where XBMC will scrape the information from. You can choose TV, Movies or Music
  10. Select OK and XBMC will begin scraping information about the media from the relevant source.
  11. Go for a nap. Depending how big your store is this could take several hours or more.
  12. Repeat for how many stores you have. In my case I had one store for movies. Another store for TV Shows and a third store for the Doctor Who collection. it took nearly 8 hours to scrape all the information for all my TV shows (every known episode of Doctor Who, Stargate SG1, Scrubs, etc)
  13. Once the scrape is complete you should now have entries for TV Shows and Movies on the XBMC menu bar and with any luck all your media will be available.
Note: You may notice some movies missing or misnamed, this is because XBMC was unable to find information about them for some reason. To rectify this, go to Videos then Files and select the store the missing movie is in. Find the movie in the list and try to refresh the information on it. The reason for this may be that the filename is misspelled or there were multiple options for the movie and XBMC chose the wrong one ( Films with multiple sequels e.g. Friday the 13th tend to do this)
When you choose to refresh the information, XBMC will attempt to find the closest match and then, if it finds multiple matches, will let you choose  the most appropriate one.
XBMC scrapes movie information from TheMovieDB and TV Shows from TheTVDB. If you are having problems finding your movies or TV Shows, check they exist on these sites.

Controlling XBMC

There are a number of options for controlling XBMC amongst them are:
  1. USB mouse and keyboard. Simple solution but is a bit bulky if you want to use the Pi as a living room device
  2. IR Remote control. If you are feeling mildly brave, it is very simple to hook up an IR receiver to the Pi's GPIO port and use a cheap remote cotnrol
  3. If you have an Android phone, I highly recommend 'Yatse' which is available for free on the Google Play store which works over the Wi-fi connection.
Configuring Live TV ->
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