As many of you may remember from my previous post, I had an unfortunate mishap with my first attempt at a home theatre pc. Well I’m going in for round 2, armed with a raspberry pi, extra fans, and the brainpower to remember to ground myself before touching anything important.

I experimented with several operating systems ranging from Raspbian to Ubuntu, even compiling from source for optimized performance tweaks, before I settled on OSMC. OSMC is a unix based install. I chose it because it boots directly to Kodi, my media software of choice, in one clean, coherent package.

I settled on OSMC

But why Kodi over Plex? I know Plex has a better ui, and makes it easier to share videos over the network, but Kodi has it beat in terms of addons. There are addons that do basically everything for Kodi, letting me also get my much coveted Premier League coverage. #ChelseaForLife. Plus Kodi is open source.

Kodi has Plex beat in terms of addons

Once everything was installed, it was a simple matter to add the plugins I needed for movies and sports as well as add a network mounted folder containing my digital movie collection. All that was left was to design and 3d print a case, download a remote app, and CraigBox 2.0 was good to go.