Raspberry Pi 2 - Available now for $35

The Raspberry Pi has always been a popular choice for people wanting to run Kodi or Plex, mostly because you can pick one up for $35. After all is said and done, $50 would get you a little media box that could handle most of the media you would try to throw at it.

I've never been a big fan since the severely underpowered CPU lead to sluggish menus and delayed interactions. Thankfully the hardware accelerated video decoding meant that media playback was smooth, but some of the allure was lost when you got back to the menu and it was struggling to keep up with you.

Announced today is the Raspberry Pi 2, which ups the CPU to a quad core 900MHz Cortex-A7 and increases the RAM to 1GB. This should do wonders for running media software and I am excited to give it a try. Despite the board being available starting today, I figure this will be like the original launch when it takes weeks to get your hands on one due to the demand. I will pick one up and share my thoughts as soon as I can though.

Source: http://www.raspberrypi.org/raspberry-pi-2-...

Getting your OpenELEC + Plex system to auto-update

So the post about how to run Plex Home Theater on a Chromebox proved to be very popular. The Chromebox has the perfect balance of power and affordability that makes it a stand out product. One question that popped up often is how does one update this system as newer builds come out. Since the Plex version is a modified form of OpenELEC, the built-in updating mechanism doesn't work. At the time, my answer was that it needed to be done manually. Luckily, that is no longer the case.

I have whipped up a quick python script that checks for updates and applies them automatically. This guide will explain how to install the script and schedule it to run on a regular basis.

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