As i couldn’t find a proper guide to editing the settings of the raspbmc os via command line/ssh or ftp, here are my findings about it. As I’m pretty new to linux, there may be some faster / more efficient ways to do this (e.g. editing the setting files via nano/vi or even writing scripts to change certain settings) but for me the following works pretty well as for now. If you have some addition / comment please share them in the section below or contact me elsewhere, tia!

If you’re new to raspbmc the FAQ in the official wiki are definitely worth checking out. Here you find the default logon information (user: pi – pw: raspberry), the commands to stop and start xbmc (used in this guide) and many other interesting infos.

1. Connect to your raspberry pi via FTP and/or SSH (i use FileZilla and the Mac OSX Terminal to do this – any other ftp/ssh client will also do)
2. Navigate to /home/<username (default ‘pi’)>/.xbmc/userdata/guisettings.xml and open or download it. As you can see in the screenshot, I use Filezilla’s context menu to ‘View/Edit’ the remote file in my default text editor.
   
3.  Look for the <mode> tag inside <audiooutput> tag or any other setting you want to change and change it to the value you need. For switching audio modes see the screenshot below.
   
   
4. Save the settings file. Filezilla automatically detects changes to the local file and offers to upload the changed file – you can also delete the local copy in the process.
   
   
5. Restart xbmc via SSH to apply the changes to your running raspberry pi – using the commands found in the FAQ mentioned above.
   

This already concludes my little guide for changing settings in raspbmc. For preferences set in the raspbmc settings addon, access the file /home/<your_username>/.xbmc/userdata/addon_data/script.raspbmc.settings/settings.xml – other than that the process is the same. Hope this helps someone – I’d be happy about every kind of feedback. Have a nice day! 🙂

Update (28.06.2013):
Good news everyone! 🙂 Starting with the June Update of the Raspbmc System we are able to output audio both to HDMI AND the analog output! This is especially useful if you also want to use your raspberry (eg. play music via airplay like I do) when your TV/monitor is switched of. I’m glad the creator(s) of raspbmc made my guide obsolete 😛

So as a quick summary, we now have the following audio output modes (<mode>x</mode>):

• 0 – analog
• 2 – HDMI
• 3 – All outputs

This is really great, thanks a lot to the raspbmc guy(s) for improving our experience even further! For more info about the june update of Raspbmc go here.