The last few months, I've been on a quest to find a decent offline local media player. My parents are in their late 70s and farmers and not very technological (well, my dad is but he won't admit it). As a geek that loves to introduce the non-geeks to tech, I've been working on a way for them to enjoy the digital media I have but in a dead easy way.
Thus my ventures back into Raspberry Pi builds. My main goals initially started out to just build a replacement media box that 1. DIDN'T REQUIRE A CONSTANT INTERNET CONNECTION TO WORK (ie Fire devices and ATV were out of the question). 2. Easy to use interface/customizable. 3. Under $150 total cost 4. Ability to use usb harddrives to host media vs just streaming services (ie no plex or netflix)
This list of criteria ineffectively lead me back to the Raspberry Pi 3 community. I had tried OpenElec on my Pi and Pi2 but loathed having to have dongles thus why the Pi 3 seemed perfect!
I ended up getting two Pi 3 rev B boards. The Pi 3 has onboard wifi and bt along w/a 1.2Ghz quad core cpu and more importantly 1GB of ram. After chatting with a pal at work who is using a Pi3 setup, I was sold.
I also got a MSL RemotePi board and case w/power button ( https://www.msldigital.com/ ). This board allows one to power off and power on the Pi 3 completely via IRDA remotes. Flirc will not allow you to power down via just one button, just a soft power down via menu or power up via remote. This is for my parents setup which I have also paired w/just a basic 16GB microSD (nothing really saved on local sdcard) and my spare 500GB external hdd w/a curated movies and tv shows colllection along w/family movies i make of my photos/vids i take.
For my own Pi 3 setup, I went more a NES Classic on steroids route. I got the NesPi case and NES30 Pro controller from 8BitDo. So far I am very impressed w/both. The controller will work on my pc, pi and nintendo switch. The NES case has four usb ports including two hidden under the game bay (along w/a lan connection).
All ports are accessible including sdcard. I run a full Plex setup at home so of course installed the official Plex add-on which i must say looks great on the Pi 3 and OSMC. I plan to just add 128GB micrSDcard via a tiny reader for some classic tv shows i like to have around and music vids. I may add a battery pack to it so i can use unplugged but we'll see. the battery is still new and hard to find in stock due to just making it to kickstarter backers (here https://www.pi-supply.com/?s=pijuice&post_type=product )
All ports are accessible including sdcard. I run a full Plex setup at home so of course installed the official Plex add-on which i must say looks great on the Pi 3 and OSMC. I plan to just add 128GB micrSDcard via a tiny reader for some classic tv shows i like to have around and music vids. I may add a battery pack to it so i can use unplugged but we'll see. the battery is still new and hard to find in stock due to just making it to kickstarter backers (here https://www.pi-supply.com/?s=pijuice&post_type=product )
At the moment, i have both setups running as I had hoped. Some notes/tips from what i've learned in the last week.
1. For OSMC, you can add RetroPie to it via a script you can run via putty/ssh. Info here:
2. To get a BT game controller to properly reconnect when running the following setup: OSMC installed as main os with retropie running inside of it. Issues w/OSMC and reconnecting to certain BT devices. This fixed my issues.
NOTE: i did add a sleep 10 in the script to work w/my setup!
NOTE: i did add a sleep 10 in the script to work w/my setup!
scroll down to the: Manual Bluetooth Configuration; we need to make the script and service to reconnect. :)
3. sick of the blue overlay on the OSMC default theme? get this newer one that lets you choose what overlay pic/color to use.
4. if retropie can't scrape some consoles, use SElphs Scraper. Notes here.
https://github.com/retropie/retropie-setup/wiki/scraper
https://github.com/retropie/retropie-setup/wiki/scraper
5. to get the power switch on the NesPi case to soft shutdown, you need to do a hardware hack (i plan to do this next week) and add to your startup script. notes here:
https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/11988/powerblock-proper-es-shutdown
I'll do a follow up post on how well the parent's OSMC setup goes for them. I feel it will be much simplier to use and in turn will get used!! As for my setup, it's now my on the go portable media player when traveling; plus i can do some retrogaming if i want to; SNES FTW!!
Hope that helps others out there since it did take me a while to google those fixes.
Hope that helps others out there since it did take me a while to google those fixes.
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