One of the most popular and useful projects with Raspberry Pi (RPi) board is turning RPi into a media center box. All you need to do is to download a media center image for RPi, and write it to your SD card. There are plenty of media center distributions for Raspberry Pi, such as OpenELEC, RaspBMC, GeeXboX, RaspyFi, etc.
In this article, I will discuss how to set up a media center on Raspberry Pi using two of the most popular media center images: OpenELEC and RaspBMC. Both images use XBMC as built-in media player software.
Full article here:
How to set up a media center with Raspberry Pi (Xmodulo)
Note: If you have any desire at all to be able to get to the internals of Linux, even for something as simple as installing additional software such as Midnight Commander, we suggest using RaspBMC, NOT OpenELEC.
You call that easy? It’s definitely not as easy as typing apt-get install mc. But you kind of missed the point. So, you can install that one specific program by going through the XBMC menus in OpenELEC, and that’s good as far as it goes. But what if the program you want to install isn’t found there? Can you predict every Linux program that an XBMC user might want to install?
If you are familiar with Linux and you want to be able to ssh into your system and do things that normally can be done from a Linux command prompt, such as editing certain configuration files or installing additional software using common tools like apt-get or yum, there’s a pretty good chance that OpenELEC will not let you do it, but RaspBMC will. If you’re setting up a system for your grandmother to use it probably doesn’t matter, but I can’t imagine a typical Linux user being all that happy with the limitations of OpenELEC. See our article, “Notes on setting up Raspbmc on a Raspberry Pi” which mentions a few reasons we went back to RaspBMC after trying OpenELEC:
http://tech.iprock.com/?p=9857
But, it’s good to have choices, and everyone is free to try both and see which one they like best.