Following up on some Raspberry Pi setup notes, I’ve been trying to use it as a media server, but besides the basic stuff, I’ve been unable to use the RPi to its full potential so far. Basically, I installed RaspBMC, which is an XBMC build designed specifically for the RPi, and it works pretty much right away. For the basic stuff anyway…

Sure, you can connect an external disk to it and browse videos, music or pictures in it but that wasn’t exactly what I had in mind. What I wanted was for the RPi to sit on a corner connected to the TV and the local network and seamlessly access the content over the network. Unfortunately, I couldn’t put these to work:

• For some reason, the official XBMC remote app for the iPhone is unable to find the RaspBMC instance and connect to it. Even if I put on the details by hand, it still doesn’t connect. The web interface works, though, but it’s a complete rubbish.
• Can’t connect the RPi to iTunes home sharing  (it works fine over the iPad or the iPhone, just not on the RPi).
• Since Mac OS X Lion introduced a new (proprietary) implementation of SMB server, XBMC (and consequently RaspBMC) is unable to connect to any SMB shares you may have, thus rendering it useless for accessing content on your Mac. Sure, there are a lot of fixes around, but almost all of them fix one thing and break another.
• AirPlay isn’t working either, I tried it both on the iPad and the iPhone. Basically, the iPad detects the AirPlay instance on the RPi but when I click on it to transfer the viewing to the television, although the iPad tells me that “this video is now playing on AirPlay…”, nothing happens on the RaspBMC side.

So, until I’m unable to fix these things, I won’t call the RPi as a media server experience a success. Not yet.