Interview: Raspbmc maintainer Sam Nazarko

Lead Image © Shawn Encarnacion, 123RF.com

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A 19-year-old student has launched the most popular media center distribution for the Raspberry Pi. Read on for the story of Raspbmc and Sam Nazarko.

The Raspberry Pi was barely on the market when a new Linux distribution transformed the mini computer into a complete media center with an excellent price/performance ratio. This distribution was Raspbmc [1], which is now the most widely used media center distro for the Raspberry Pi. Since its inception, Raspbmc has also been very reliably maintained. Raspbmc uses a modified Raspbian system that boots into a version of XBMC [2], which has been optimized and expanded with many patches.

XBMC consists of powerful media center software. The first version appeared for the Xbox; thus, the acronym XBMC also stood for "Xbox Media Center." Over the years, XBMC was ported to additional hardware platforms like Apple TV and the iPad.

When XBMC became available for the Raspberry Pi, the number of users, which was already significant, literally exploded. Three different distributions brought XBMC to the Pi, including OpenELEC, Xbian, and Raspbmc. So far, Raspbmc has emerged as the most popular.

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