Newbluesman: I am impressed by your results, I've had nothing but headaches.
Using the Pi as a music server or renderer has great appeal to me but I have not succeeded. About six months ago, I successfully loaded Media Center 21 onto the Pi 2 and thought I was home free. But it wouldn't play without dropouts, which kind of ruins the whole "if perfect audio is your goal" aspect of MC.
Here's a bit about my environment: my wireless router is Netgear Nighthawk X6, with PLENTY of speed. On the network I have two PCs running MC, and a Yamaha RX-A2020 with DLNA capability. I can play from either PC to the other with no dropouts. I can play from either PC to the Yamaha with no dropouts. I can play from either PC to my HTC One phone with Gizmo with no dropouts. I can play from either PC to my frigging Kindle Fire with no dropouts. But as soon as the Pi is entered into the equation, I get drop outs. In each case, by the way, I'm using FLAC files.
I tried overclocking, no help. So after awhile, I figured it just wasn't going to work. It seems the horsepower just isn't there for whatever reasons.
Well a few days back I noticed that the Pi 3 was out, and it looked like a real upgrade in terms of horsepower over the 2 so I figured it was worth another forty bucks to give that a shot.
The first thing I learned, which other people have learned, is that it's not as simple as taking the SD out of the 2 and putting it into the 3. It won't boot. So I downloaded the latest raspbian image (2016-03-18-raspian-jessie), put it on a new SD, and attempted to go through the installation process based on the excellent directions on how to load MC onto the Pi. There appear to be a number of changes that are problematic.
The first thing I tried to do was to follow the same sequence as laid out on this site for the Pi 2. Once I made the changes to the config text:
framebuffer_depth=32
framebuffer_ignore_alpha=1
When I rebooted, the video never came back. I mean the boot screen appeared, the status scrolled, but then it would disappear. Ok, there's maybe something in the graphics that's different.
Then I figured I'd at least try to load MC to see what would happen. It didn't finish. I got the following:
Input/Output Eror
dbkg: error processing package shared mime-info (--unpack)
subprocess installed post-installation script
returned error exit status 1
dbks: error: unable to synch new file
'/var/lib/dpkg/status-new: input/output error E: subprocess /usr/bin/dpkg returned and error code 2
when I rebooted, I got the same as before, the status scrolled by then blank screen.
I have put hours into this with no luck. What's the trick?