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.