RaspberryPi into a Roku

Have a look a Kodi.

You can add it to a Linux distro, or grab OpenELEC which is a Kodi-specific distro.

You might want to buy some of the hardware codec licenses for your Pi too.

All developers of OpenElec but one left this project in spring and now can be found under LibreElec!

- j -

History repeating itself?

Try OSMC. It has a working Kodi and a full Debian(ish?) impementation which OpenELEC doesn't have.

Thanks for that - hadn't noticed. Just went off to read about it...

The design principle of Open/LibreELEC is that there's nothing there that isn't needed to run Kodi, but you seem to think it's a negative feature. With something like R-Pi where installing a new OS is as difficult as changing an SD card I think there's room for more specialised embedded-style applications as well as the general purpose Linux PC approach. If you wanted a Debian ecosystem why not just run Raspbian, and sudo apt-get install kodi? Then you can have a slower boot, and lots of stuff you don't really use that needs updating, compared to LibreELEC.

It also has one of the most confusing interfaces I've ever come across. I've given it several tries since it first came out, to make sure it wasn't that I just caught it at an early stage.

---druck

Agree with both you and the previous poster in essence. But I could never get Kodi running properly/reliably on a raw Raspbian installation and not using OpenELEC means I can run apache, php, mysql, dnsmasq and postfix all on the same Pi, instead of the two I had previously.

YMMV Cheers

The last one I set up on a RPi 2 was Kodi on an installation of Ubuntu Mint. It works fine except for the minor inconvenience of having to enter the root password when starting it from the desktop, but I'm sure there is a work around for that.

Interestingly you can have the non-X Kodi running on the HDMI screen, and still RDP in to the desktop remotely (using x11vnc and xrdp).

---druck

You can change the skin on it back to normal (I think) Kodi, which makes things much easier. I couldn't use the default skin.