[Nukles]

Hi all,

I tried to look on the wikis but I haven't found anything helpful...

I have a Raspberry Pi with Raspbian on it; headless. So far I've been successfully streaming my media through miniDLNA to all my devices. I was accessing files, so far, with just my SmartTV by selecting the DLNA server as a Source.
However that's not as fun as by running XBMC :-) with all nice pictures and plots and trailers and stuff.

So I was considering running XBMC for my TV. Before buying another Pi, I thought about testing XBMC on my current Pi.
I installed XBMC according to these guidelines: http://michael.gorven.za.net/raspberrypi/xbmc, on top of the pre-existing OS (Raspbian Wheezy - so no SD card with only RaspBMC).
I attached XBMC to my SmartTV via HDMI.

I successfully started XBMC but when I selected a movie and started to play it, the movie is not visualized correctly (I see lots of small coloured "bars" in 3D moving around)... of course, because the Raspberry Pi has no great Graphic Card. It can't reproduce videos natively as it doesn't have a graphic card...

So how are you guys using Raspberry Pi for XBMC? What is the device that is actually running the video?

Thanks.

[Milhouse]

I successfully started XBMC but when I selected a movie and started to play it, the movie is not visualized correctly (I see lots of small coloured "bars" in 3D moving around)... of course, because the Raspberry Pi has no great Graphic Card. It can't reproduce videos natively as it doesn't have a graphic card...

Actually, the GPU in the Raspberry Pi is pretty capable (all things considered) and can easily "reproduce videos natively" - 1080p H264 content is not a problem for the Pi. You may need to buy the MPEG2 and VC1 licences if you want to play such content, however.

So how are you guys using Raspberry Pi for XBMC? What is the device that is actually running the video?

Install a nightly build of Raspbmc or OpenELEC for the best possible experience - see the two threads in this forum for download links. Not sure about XBian, that might be worth a shot too.

I certainly wouldn't run XBMC on top of Raspbian, it's probably the least updated and worst performing version available.

[Bosse_B]

... when I selected a movie and started to play it, the movie is not visualized correctly (I see lots of small coloured "bars" in 3D moving around)... of course,

I think that what you see is the effect you get when you play MPEG-2 encoded video (like DVD movies or TV recorded TS streams).
These types of files require the installation of a license key for MPEG-2, which you have to buy from the RaspberryPi store.
Without the key you will hear the sound but only see an area of bouncing boxes.
I also wondered about this a week or so ago but after installing the license keys for MPEG-2 and VC-1 the non-playing videos came to life!

because the Raspberry Pi has no great Graphic Card. It can't reproduce videos natively as it doesn't have a graphic card...

The Pi does have a capable "graphics card"! It is one of the chips on the board that houses the graphics subsystem and the main idea behind the board was to provide a low-cost system capable of playing video. So this conclusion of yours is definitely incorrect.
It can handle up to 1920x1080p HD video.

Suggestion
To verify your installation please download or otherwise attach some MP4 videos and test play these.
Amazingly MPEG4 is not blocked by licensing issues while MPEG2 is. Don't know why.

EDIT:
And as MilhouseVH (who beat me to the solution by a couple of minutes) wrote:
Install Raspbmc with the integrated XBMC instead of what you have! Easily done using a separate SDcard if you don't want to scrap your existing setup.
Here are a couple of useful links:
Raspberry Pi XBMC Media Player setup video
Setting Up a Raspberry Pi video
Raspberry Pi downloads, I used the NOOBS zipfile