Justin Latimer

raspbmc

Raspbmc to OpenELEC

Last night my Raspbmc setup hung while opening a movie. I cycled the power, and I guess that corrupted the memory card. When it booted, it got stuck in an infinite loop trying to start XBMC. You know, the infamous "Relax..." screen. Well, yeah, I was trying to relax and watch a movie, but ended up rebuilding my media center instead. I tried all the usual tricks to fix a XBMC reboot loop:

  • Reboot without network plugged in.
  • SSH in and remove the ~/.xbmc folder.
  • Desperately try removing the ~/.xbmc-current symlink.
  • Try and edit /scripts/xbmc-watchdog.sh to actually write logs somewhere, which doesn't work.
  • Throw raspberry pi out window.

Once I had resigned myself to rebuilding the image, I decided to switch to OpenELEC. A couple of hours later, everything was up and running. I have my library running on a MySQL server and all my media accessed via SMB, so once I copied the right XML files over everything was just like I left it.

Installing tvheadend was a bit different from Raspbmc. OpenELEC doesnt come with it preinstalled, but it includes an add-on system that shows up in the XBMC menus. So all you've gotta do is pick the package and go. It was really easy, much easier than I expected.

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