Building Your Ultimate Media Server
By: Anuradha Wickramarachchi
Tags: Entertainment, Tech, Streaming, DIY, Open Source

In my Netflix home, I can continue from wherever I stopped watching. Don’t you just like to have that simple feature in all your other media? Imagine your Coursera course content or your University's zoom lecture recordings? Convenient!

Configuring a Raspberry Pi

For this particular task, I used a Raspberry Pi-4 8GB RAM device, I’ll call this RPi hereafter. You can pick whatever the model you desire, more specs mean better streaming. Following are the required equipment for this setup.

Any RPi device

device MicroSD memory card for setting up the operating system of RPi (with a reader attachable to your computer)

memory card for setting up the operating system of RPi (with a reader attachable to your computer) External HDD to have your media (you can configure a NAS if you like, but I’ll skip that setup here)

We can configure the RPi with any distribution. Following was my setup for the RPi.

Download RPi imager from https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/

Open the program and choose an operating system. Note that LibreELEC (refer to the screenshot below) is a Kodi distribution itself. However, having other projects in mind with my RPi, I chose the Raspberry Pi OS(32-bit option).

Screenshot by Author

Then pick the SD card location and flash the card

You might want to change a few settings in the config.txt file in the SD card. This helps to set display resolution for a temporary display

hdmi_force_hotplug=1

max_usb_current=1

hdmi_group=2

hdmi_mode=1

hdmi_cvt 1024 768 60 6 0 0 0

hdmi_drive=1

Installing and Running Kodi on RPi

Now that our RPi is ready, we can go ahead and install Kodi. You can find detailed instructions here. However, you can simply run the following commands.

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo apt-get update

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo apt-get install kodi

You can run Kodi using the following command on the terminal

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ kodi

You’ll see the following screen.

Screenshot by Author

Now everything is ready to go!

There are several ways you can use Kodi!

Connecting to the TV Directly

Connecting to your TV is pretty straight forward. Once you have connected to your TV using the HDMI cable, you are ready to use. But how are you going to control? If you have a touch screen for RPi, you’ll see that the GUI is touch-friendly. Anyway, you don’t need it!. Kodi has a remote from the original project itself.

Screenshot by Author from Google Play

Though I have not tested, there are several remotes for Kodi in the Apple store as well. Following are a few I found.

Screenshot by Author from Apple iTunes

You have the complete freedom from the remote and it is very easy to use. However, make sure you go to Settings->Services->Control and enable remote control. See the following screenshot.

Screenshot by Author

You have a few advanced options to connect within the remote App too.

Kodi Remote (Screenshot by Author)

As long as you are within the same WiFi network and have enabled the control over HTTP you can access the remote.

Connecting Over HTTP

Kodi initiates a web interface by default when you enable the remote functionality. There you get a streaming API to stream content. This is very useful if you happen to use Kodi from your phone or laptop.

Simply go to <IP ADDRESS OF RPi>:8080 from Chrome. Then you’ll get a web interface. There you can have the same functionality of Kodi over the HDMI connected TV.

Kodi over HTTP (Screenshot by Author)

You can stream content to your browser as follows.

Screenshot by Author

Once the media starts playing on your browser, you can always cast to your Chromecast device to watch on another TV/SmartTV (not connected via HDMI).

More Tips and Tricks

You can set Kodi to be launched at startup (look out for that) if you RPi is going to be a media server for a very long time

is going to be a media server for a very long time You can run Kodi in a headless mode (https://github.com/milaq/kodi-headless). I am yet to try this approach. I just love the GUI and how it works using the Kodi Remote.

mode (https://github.com/milaq/kodi-headless). I am yet to try this approach. I just love the GUI and how it works using the Kodi Remote. You can attach an HDD to RPi, or add network-attached storage (NAS). This is handy for me since I have an 8TB NAS for my photo backups.

for my photo backups. You can install Kodi on any device (Mac, PC, Android device, etc). You can use the remote with them as well.

You can connect external streaming services to Kodi as well. That helps you gather all your streaming services at once place too.

Plenty of community help is available since Kodi is an open-source project. Hence, I believe it should be promoted over proprietary software. Quality of the software definitely speaks out for the devs! Kudos to them!

I hope you enjoyed this article. Let me know your thoughts and how you use Kodi. :)

Stream and Chill!

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