With a Raspberry Pi you can listen to music, watch tv and videos and generally use it as a home entertainment system.
You should be able to do most things with VLC (which comes installed with Raspbian OS). However you can also use other free software such as OSMC, Volumio or Kodi.
I thought I would try Kodi as it is available as an install from the Raspberry Pi repository. Learning to do everthing (and in the right order) involved a fair amount of searching online, but I managed to distil the process down to the following:
I used the following hardware:
Raspberry Pi 3B+ / 16 GB micro SD card / Keyboard / Mouse / Monitor /
Download Raspbian Lite and check the SHA-256 checksum is right. Put the .img file on a micro sd card using software called imager. (Available from the Raspberry Pi website)
Put the card in the RPi 3B+ and connect to a screen a keyboard and mouse and switch it on. It will go through its set-up procedure which should only take a minute or two.
Change the default password and connect to the Pi to the internet. At the command prompt type:
sudo apt update
sudo apt install ufw
sudo ufw enable
Restart the RPi. At the command prompt type:
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
Then type: Y
This should install all the software updates.
Restart the RPi. Then at the command prompt, install the desktop via:
Sudo apt install raspberrypi-ui-mods
Sudo reboot
Open a terminal window and type the following:
Sudo apt install kodi
Reboot
Open a terminal window and type:
Sudo raspi-config
Change the memory split so that the GPU has 256 megabytes
Change the boot options so that the RPi boots to cmd
Open a terminal window and type the following:
crontab –e
Choose the nano option
Add: @reboot kodi –standalone
Crtl O then Crtl X to save and close the file.
You might also like to stop the firewall if not going back on line again by going to a command prompt and type:
sudo ufw disable
Reboot and hey presto Kodi should start up and be available to you.
There is a way to install the RPi Lite OS without the raspberrypi-ui-mods and then install
Kodi and add the dependancies that the Kodi gui needs. It looks a bit complex from what I have read online so I just chose to do it this way.
It seems relatively simple and it works for me. I will try at some point to do it without the Raspberry Pi gui which should free up some more resources.