Raspberry Pi

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Home icon grey.png   ▶ Devices ▶ Raspberry Pi
Stop hand.png These pages are maintained by the community and should not be considered an endorsement or recommendation. Device pages are made when there's a bunch of useful information for a particular device, and someone takes the time to make that page. Keep in mind, some devices simply don't need a page of specific information, but are still excellent devices. *


Single-board computer Raspberry Pi.jpg
Attention talk.png For more info and help, check out the Kodi Raspberry Pi support forum

The Raspberry Pi (and Raspberry Pi 2) is an series of ARM powered, credit card sized single-board computers (developer boards) made in the UK by the non-profit Raspberry Pi Foundation organization for educational and hobbyist purposes. These low power computers is mass produced at very low prices and the high number of units sold gives it massive community support. As an Kodi HTPC, all Raspberry Pis supports full 1080p (Full HD) video playback of the most commonly used codecs, support for most if not all Kodi add-ons, and reasonably responsive GUI performance.

Installing Kodi

Easy / Kodi centric distributions


Advanced / can be used with Kodi

Note that Arch ARM provides different Kodi packages optimized for different RPi models. All builds offer some flavor of HW accelerated decoding just like LibreELEC. The following packages will supply the current stable version of Kodi:

kodi-rpi for RPi 3/4/400

kodi-rpi-legacy for RPi 2

Users wanting to track the master branch may select:

kodi-rpi-git for RPi 3/4/400 only

  • Raspberry Pi OS - Up-to-date versions (Currently Leia 18.7) of Kodi are now on the default Raspbian repositories. See full guide here.


Frequently Asked Questions

See: Raspberry Pi FAQ

Maximizing performance

  • Use a lightweight skin such as the default Confluence, Amber, Quartz, Bellow, or xTV-SAF.
  • Turn off RSS feeds and any scrolling text options for your skin.
  • You can also try to use a combination of SD and fast USB drive for your Kodi install, but recent improvements to the software make it so that even just using a good SD card is about as fast as using a fast USB drive.
  • Avoid using wifi. If you do use wifi, use a wifi adapter that contains two antenna (either internally or externally). Otherwise, stick to wired ethernet, local USB drives, or ethernet-over-power devices (like Homeplug, etc).
  • Try using NFS file shares instead of SMB file shares.
  • Try mounting network shares through OS rather than Kodi. This allows more tweaking of filesystem options, like chosing UDP and larger block sizes. See This raspbmc thread for details
  • Overclock. Most Pi's can handle a significant overclock, as long as they have a good power supply. There is no universal setting that will work for everyone (except for the default speed that you get without overclocking). Try various overclocking settings and run Kodi for a while and see if it's stable. If one group of overclocking settings causes crashes, try a group of settings that are lower than that. For more information about this check out this forum thread: http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=199272
  • "Extract thumbnail and video information" from file lists settings is disabled by default on the Pi as it improves browsing performance.
  • For smoother video playback enable "Adjust display refresh rate to match video" from playback settings
  • When using dvdplayer "Sync playback to display" and "adjust PLL" for sync method are recommended. See playback settings
  • Make sure the video is using H.264 (up to High Profile. Hi10P will not work) or MPEG-4, or, if a codec was purchased and enabled, MPEG-2 or VC-1.
  • Passthrough is recommended as it lowers CPU usage for DTS and AC3. Use audio passthrough if your TV/receiver supports it.
  • To determine which audio passthrough formats your HDMI-connected TV supports, you can log in to your chosen distribution, via SSH, and run this command: /opt/vc/bin/tvservice a (on OpenELEC: tvservice -a).
  • Some additional advanced tips for speeding up boot times. Editor note: Some of this can likely be broken up into individual bullet points for this list, but I haven't examined any of this in detail yet. I'm not sure which ones only improve boot time and which ones improve actual performance once already booted. If anyone wants to take a whack at this, please do. http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=201354
  • For locally connected drives containing videos and music, the format of the drive can have an impact on read and write speeds. For example, NTFS tends to be much slower on any Linux-based system than the more native EXOFS formats (ext2, ext3, etc).
  • If you use MySQL then you will want to make sure your images are pre-cached using the Texture Cache Maintenance utility tool. Local libraries typically don't need this as their images are cached when videos are scanned in. Using MySQL can improve performance as the database queries are handled by another machine.
  • Organizing your movies in single folders for each movie, rather than all movies in one folder, is recommended. The individual folders reduce the time it takes for Kodi to look for supporting media like external subtitles, making browsing, scanning and starting playback a little faster. You might also want to consider pre-scraping the meta data using a Library manager to reduce the time it takes to scan in both movies and TV shows.


Remote controls

Wiring instructions for a TSOP4838 GPIO IR sensor.
GPIO IR receiver
Don't have a CEC TV or a smartphone remote? For less than a dollar/euro, you can add an IR receiver to your Raspberry Pi that works with most MCE and Apple remotes (and a few others). Most Kodi install options for the Pi should work with the GPIO IR out of the box, or by enabling a setting from within Kodi. Go to a local electronics store or search on ebay for "TSOP4838" and use some simple jumper wires (or solder the pins directly, if you wish). (We need a link to a good, up to date GPIO IR guide. Most of the links I found are outdated and contain instructions for additional configurations that are no longer required. If you find a good link/guide, please add it to the wiki.)


If you are using OpenELEC just add this to your config.txt file:

device_tree_overlay=lirc-rpi

If you are using OSMC, just go to My OSMC -> Pi Configuration and enable 'GPIO IR remote support' and click OK. A reboot will be required. You can also select from a list of remote presets from My OSMC -> Remotes to ensure that all buttons are working correctly.

CEC
If your TV supports CEC then you should be able to use the remote control that came with your TV to control Kodi. The remote control signals are sent over the HDMI cable and most often don't require any further settings or configuration.


MCE remotes
Various MCE USB receivers and remotes will work on the Pi.


Keyboards and mice
Any Keyboard such as wired, wireless, bluetooth. This includes remotes that are seen as keyboards, such as Rii remotes, the Mele F10-Pro remote, or the (very awesome) Flirc.


Smartphone/tablet remotes
Use your smartphone or tablet as a remote control.


Web interfaces
Control Kodi from anything that has a web browser.


Further reading

Random notes

Feel free to place various notes, tips, and links here. As this section of the wiki gets more organized, those notes will be properly sorted. Consider this like a dumping ground for when you're not sure where to put something.