Is it possibly to have my pi play videos stored on my external hard drive?

Question

im very new to all this, and i want to know if its possibly to have my raspberry pi play movies and such that i have stored on a WD My passport 500GB External Hard Drive. ive mounted the hard drive i think, and i still need to set it up to automount, but after that im lost, all the tutorials that i have found are all about setting it up as XBMC server that is linked to a main pc that has all the files on it. I want to have my raspberry pi as the small computer it is and still be able to have it be a self contained media centre. is that possible?

EDIT

Ok, after doing some more work i was able to get my hard drive to auto mount. which is surprising because its running off a usb port directly on the pi and not a powered usb hub. after mounting, im able to access the files on the drive via file manager. and currently im downloading VLC player via apt-get install vlc which means i will be able to play my media files just like i would on my regular pc. it appears that i don't need raspbmc or XBMC to accomplish what i wanted. thanks for the suggestions though.

EDIT

after booting up my pi and then plugging in my external hard drive, i notice that /dev takes much longer to load. and that my hard drive begins to make an audible "clicking" noise, which i found out that it means that isn't getting enough power. i have a powered usb hub coming soon to fix that problem. also when i go to play a video i notice that my cpu spikes and the video won't play.

EDIT

So my powered USB hub arrived and im able to now plug in my external hard drive without hearing the clicking noise, solving that problem. I can also now navigate into my drive to find my movies. But how would i go about playing them via omxplayer? i've tried omxplayer -o hdmi /home/pi/movietitle.mp4 but to no avail. it runs the command then just prints "Have a nice day ;)" and returns me to the command line. any more help would be great.

Answer 1

There is a simple but functional media player called omxplayer specially developed for the Raspberry Pi. It uses the GPU for video decoding, something VLC might not (yet?) do. Omxplayer should be available through the package manager, apt-get in this case. It works on the command line, just say omxplayer filename It does not even need to have X running.

XBMC is of course an option, but installing it is quite involved unless you install one of the special distributions for it. For a media center, you probably want a full XBMC in the end, for the user interface. But for just trying things out omxplayer should be fine. In fact, omxplayer is the video player used in XBMC.

Answer 2

Once you have XBMC installed on your Raspberry Pi. It should be a simple matter of using XBMC to navigate to your external HDD and playing the files.

To answer your question though. Yes it is possible and quite a popular use for the Raspberry Pi.

The easiest way to install XBMC is to use one of the modified distro's. Raspbmc is a popular option and so is OpenELEC. Raspbmc is easier to install (my honest opinion)

Answer 3

i also use the standard raspbian for just what you're doing. tried xbmc but found no way to really internet, although it's very slick especially with the remote control through a wifi phone etc, so went back to raspbian.

still working on getting "puppi raspi" to work on wifi with a mini wifi dongle.

looks like you 'could' put xbmc on raspbian, from your references, but omxplayer on raspbian is really very good, you'll need to start it using an

lxterminal -e omxplayer -o hdmi %f  #command if you're in 'x'
# the -o hdmi if you're using the hdmi for sound...

if you want to keep the left and right arrow, and q [plus other maybe] keys to rewind, fast-forward, and quit.