Build your own Raspberry Pi Media Centre with hard drive storage. However, this project gives you apps, as well as hard drive storage capacity for your own content too! THE BROAD OVERVIEW With streaming services increasing in popularity, the humble media centre has arguably become less useful. This project uses the popular Raspberry Pi 3+ with the free and open source Kodi media player application to create a home theatre in your home (or bedroom). We show you how to install the Kodi media player onto your RPi so you can play videos, music, podcasts and other media files from an SD card or hard drive onto a TV or monitor. Next month, we will explore the option of adding an external HDD or two by building a powered USB Hub! To get started, all that’s required is a Raspberry Pi 3+ and an SD Card. If you want to run more than a single USB Hard Drive from a Raspberry Pi, you’ll rapidly end up running into a power problem. Your Pi will struggle to keep the power going to a few drives. The build in next month's issue solves this by creating a USB power injection circuit to provide plenty of 5V power. Instead of hitting the ' Next ' button, be careful this time.

Launch the EXE file and the 'Installation Wizard' will appear. Use the provided link and then click on the ' Installer (64bit) ' button to download the file. First, you need to download Kodi’s EXE (executable) file. This is then used to power the USB drives, and also the Raspberry Pi itself. Please note that you need a USB drive for this method to work.

In next month’s article, we will also finish the build and provide a home theatre inspired 3D printed case with different hard drive configurations.

Install kodi on usb flash drive