ADUFRAY

I’ve been a long-time user of XBMC, the Xbox Media Center software, since back when it ran on the original Xbox. It’s always impressed what the developers could do with such little horsepower. I remember playing 720p XviDs on the original Xbox, when it was difficult to do it otherwise.

Now, it is just as impressive. You can stream full bitrate Blu-ray images to your TV via LibreELEC/Kodi and a cheap Raspberry Pi 3. Here’s my part list:

Part	Price
Raspberry Pi 3	$35.00
16 GB microSDHC Card	$5.45
Power Supply	$6.65
VC-1 Codec License	£1.00
MPEG2 Codec License	£2.00
Kodi RPi Case	$19.95
Flirc IR USB	$14.92
Total	~$86.36

All you truly need is the Raspberry Pi, the microSDHC card, and the power supply (you can use any 2 amp power supply and micro USB cable you have lying around, perhaps an old iPad charger), which puts the required cost at about ~$47. The rest are nice-to-haves.

Once you have your parts, load up the LibreELEC (successor to OpenELEC) Raspberry Pi 3 image. If you buy the extra codec licenses, simply execute the following commands:

# mount -o remount,rw /flash
# cat << END >> /flash/config.txt
decode_MPG2=0xbeefcafe  //replace with your keys
decode_WVC1=0xdeadfade
END
# reboot

When you reboot, SSH back into LibreELEC and type these commands to confirm they’re enabled:

# vcgencmd codec_enabled MPG2
# vcgencmd codec_enabled WVC1

You should see the following output:

MPG2=enabled
WVC1=enabled

After all this, I was able to stream ~35 Mb/s bitrate Blu-ray rips from my Samba share across wired Ethernet. The Raspberry Pi 3 also has built-in WiFi, so you can conceivably stream most things without that extra cable — probably not 30+ Mb/s bitrate though.