I’m starting to get more and more into building home media centers.  Sure, you can buy a Windows Media Center version but what is the fun in that?

I’ve run across a cool media center software called GeeXboX.  Here’s what their website says:

GeeXboX is a free embedded Linux distribution which aims at turning your computer into a so called HTPC (Home Theater PC) or Media Center. Being a standalone LiveCD-based distribution, it’s a ready to boot operating system than works on any Pentium-class x86 computer or PowerPC Macintosh, implying no software requirement. You can even use it on a diskless computer, the whole system being loaded in RAM.

Despite his tiny ISO image size, the distribution comes with a complete and automatic hardware detection, not requiring any driver to be added. It supports playback of nearly any kind of audio/video and image files and all known codecs and containers are shipped in, allowing playing them through various physical supports, either being CD, DVD, HDD, LAN or Internet.

GeeXboX also comes with a complete toolchain that allows developers adding easily extra packages and features but that might also be used to give birth to many dedicated embedded Linux systems.

One of the cool things about GeeXboX is that it is designed to be completely self sufficient.  There is no need to upgrade your operating system or download the latest codecs in order for the system to work.  All you need is to boot from a livecd and you are off and running.

Of course, what really caught my eye was the ability to put GeeXboX on a bootable USB drive and then dump my videos onto it.  The whole process took me about 10 minutes with 9 minutes being the wait for the download to complete!

Here is how I did it.

Things to Get

First, you will need to get a few things:

  1. Empty USB drive formatted FAT or FAT32.  The bigger the better but I would say 1 GB would be a good start but the bigger the better because you can take more videos with you. GeeXboX takes up about 32 MB.
  2. GeeXboX ISO.  The current version as of the writing of this post is 1.2.1 and is available for x86 32-bit, x86 64-bit and PowerPC.
  3. GeeXboX Win32 Installer.  Version 0.22 available at the writing of this post.

Build the USB Media Player

Once you have downloaded everything and have your USB drive in your computer, start the Win32 Installer.

Click on Next>.

Click on I Agree.

Select Install to drive/partition dedicated to GeeXboX: and click Next>.

Click on Browse and select the ISO that you previously downloaded.  Then click on Process.  This will prepare the ISO for installation to your USB drive.

Once it has completed processing, the Next> button will become available.  Click it.

Select the drive letter of the USB drive on which you want to install GeeXboX.  Read the warning and then click Install.

Wait patiently which GeeXboX installs to your USB drive.  It shouldn’t take more than a minute or two.

Click Finish and you’re GeeXboX bootable USB media center is ready to go!

Add Some Videos

Now that you’re system is ready, all you need to do is put some videos on the USB drive.  Simply drag the video files from your computer to the root of your new USB media player.  Once they are done copying, you’re ready to go!

Boot and Go!

Now, all you need to do is take your USB drive to a computer system, get it to boot from the USB drive (either by changing the BIOS to boot from the USB device first or by using a boot menu).  It should boot into the initial splash screen:

Once it has completed the initial boot, you should get a menu looking something like this:

This gives you complete control over the entire system.

Here is what a typical movie would look like with the menu overlayed:

There are lots of other things that you can do with GeeXboX.  I’d love to hear what you come up with!

By the way, here are some more links to GeeXboX that I have found to be useful:

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Tim Fehlman