For those people that don't know - XBMC started off as a hack for the original XBox that made it into a media centre.
It's since become a stand-alone media app, installable on everything from the Apple TV to Linux. It plays everything you throw at it, keeps track of where you were up to when you last hit pause, and happily interconnects with all sorts of sources.
Speaking of pausing, one of my favourite features is how it works with the Android XBMC remote. If somebody calls my phone it will pause whatever is playing, show a notification on the TV and resume playing when I hang up. Always surprises me.
Piece of advice: get the standalone IR (or BT) remote. Not only you will have haptic feedback mentioned by skeletonjelly, but the battery will last months and, the most important thing, you can wake up the HTPC from sleep (yes, you can use WOL with the Android remote, but it takes too long).
Another alternative is to get HDMI CEC-USB adapter and use remote from your telly for control. Pricewise, they are about the same as remotes.
Another option is Flirc , cross between a uSB IR reciever and a programmable remote. You can teach it any existing IR remotes you have and it appears to the system like a USB keyboard.
The only thing I hate about it is that it lacks haptic feedback so you can't really look at the TV screen and know where the buttons are, you'll have a high failure rate basically.
I assume he's talking about a "remote" app for Android. There are a dozen for iOS at least. They all work via the HTTP interface that xbmc exposes, I believe.
I've been running this on a Mac Mini connected to my HDTV for some time now and it's become my favorite media player, mainly due to it's smooth integration with the Apple remote control and keeping track of what I've already watched. It really does play anything, including all kinds of subtitles and "just works".
Have you tried Plex? I've been a dedicated Plex user for a while now, but I've noticed quite a few bugs lately and development seems to have slowed on the desktop client as of late (though I recent blog post says they'll be getting back to it soon). I just want to know if I should consider switching to XBMC.
I'm on Plex .8 because Plex .9 didn't allow delete. There was a shitstorm in the forums about this, and it's been implemented, so I never upgraded. The other thing I hated about Plex .9 was the UI. I really liked the "browse by filesystem." I'm considering giving XBMC a try again (I started with that and went to Plex when they had much better Mac support).
Nice... I'm considering switching over to XBMC for a week or two to see how I like it. I might write a blog post to compare the two soon. Moving this week though, so it might be a while.
I tried the same, but it hangs often so i switched to boxee (which is just an a XMBC clone, but seemed to work better. Maybe i should give the new version a try.
I picked up an Apple TV for Airplay use with my iPad, but was disappointed that I couldn't play my movies on my media server. Luckily I found out XBMC runs on it, and it works quite well. I've been using the Eden beta on my ATV for a month or two now, good to see it's been released.
The $100 AppleTV + XBMC really is one of the best HTPCs you can have. For playing digital media it's not only one of the best options but one of the cheapest. Can't wait for AppleTV3 to get a jailbreak.
I can also recommend Zotac's HTPCs for XBMC. While more expensive than the Apple TV ($250~), you get a great little linux-friendly box that does full HD without any issues. If you don't feel like messing with it, you can just drop Openelec on it and you're pretty much done.
They also come with SD card slots so you can buy them without a hard drive and boot from a class 10 SD card as a poor man's SSD (provided you have a NAS). Alternately, it makes a great NAS ;)
This is great news. I've been running a Win 7 XBMC for a while now and have been holding off on the Apple TV precisely because I couldn't play my own movies. I didn't know you could JB and install XBMC.
Thanks for the info!!
Eden is a great version. I used to have version 10 crash on me all the time - which was horrible (in a first world problems way) that I had to find a laptop, shell in and restart XBMC, or make it non-windowed, or just reboot the machine. Congratulations to the team!
I'll give this a shot, but I'm not optimistic. I have an Nvidia Ion graphics card in my HTPC, and h.264 acceleration doesn't work with anything other than MPC-HC (I tried XBMC 10). It's really too bad, because the Ion chipsets are wonderful for HTPCs, and XBMC has a great UI. A combination of the two has the potential to be a great HTPC that actually plays everything (instead of the half-assedness of Apple TV or Roku).
Optimistic? You're in for a surprise. It works perfectly on my Asrock ION 330 with the Ion graphics card. Can play 1080p flawlessly without hardly affecting the CPU thanks for the VDPAU acceleration http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=HOW-TO:Install_XBMC_on_...
My HTPC had an Ion, and I had flawless hardware decoding of 1080p H.264 in XBMC on Linux about 2 years ago. Unfortunately, I can't give you an easy step-by-step guide, because I spent like a week tweaking the system, but it was basically a then-recent build of XBMC with hardware acceleration provided by VDPAU. It was an amazing setup. (Everything is in the past tense because I've since moved to San Francisco and don't have room for a TV.)
I've had XBMC 10.1 running on an Acer Aspire Revo R3601 (which I think is Ion based) for a couple of years now and it's been able to smoothly play everything I've ever thrown at it. The trick is to get VDPAU working.
My HTPC has been out of commission for over a year, and I used to run XBMC 9.x on on a Nvidia Ion board with full GPU acceleration. (At least I'm pretty sure the Atom chip wasn't decoding 1080p all by itself...)
A feature I've been looking for in a media player is the ability to run a custom script against a file from the media player's file browser. I have a script that I use to mark a file as watched, which I currently run as an Automator Action from the OS X Finder after watching the video.
Has anyone come across a way of doing file-level 'actions' within a full screen media player?
Why do you need a script to mark a file as watched? On Plex and XMBC you can easily toggle a file's watched/unwatched status from the navigation interface.
I store this watched status on a server that other people created. It is used to collect statistics of how many people watched a particular file. It also allows me to see what files I've already watched as I use multiple devices.
I've been running XMBC on Linux on a dedicated for several years now. I built a custom box using a mini-ITX (9"x9") board, and dual 2TB drives using LVM for 4TB of storage. It's become a great entertainment box for the kids. I keep all their movies/TV shows on there and it's simple enough that even the wife can turn on a movie for them!
I first used XBMC back when it was XBMP and I was looking around for better dashes than evoX on my xbox. Good times getting those t3ch builds and pushing them to the xbox, occasionally messing it up and needing to drop back to the bootloader to fix it :)
It is incredible how this project has kept on pushing out great features and support for new platforms. I talk to people at work who have discovered this and now use it on their mac mini/htpc, and are completely disconnected from the whole Xbox aspect of it.
This team has a great idea when they initially tried getting builds working and usable on windows and linux. I wouldn't have imagined at the time how far this project would come.
Personally, I moved from Boxee to XBMC when I noticed that Boxee was calling back to boxee.tv every time I watched a video, telling them what I was watching. Even if it was just a local video file. With no option to turn that off. And with them ignoring my emails asking for information when I contacted privacy@boxee.tv.
Well, that's sort of the entire purpose of Boxee. Or at least, it was. It was the "Social Media Player", that allowed you and friends to see what each other were watching, etc. I think they've moved on from that a little now that they've seen that people don't particularly want that.
Not the same now that Boxee isn't behind it, sadly. Most developers are focused on XBMC (and have been for a long time) so I think Boxee on computers may struggle to keep going as an open source project.
This is great. Has anyone managed to jail break the Apple TV 3 to get XBMC on there? Or would you need to downgrade the Apple TV firmware to the 2 version to be able to jailbreak?
xbmc also has builds for the iOS. You'd need a jailbroken iDevice to get it to run, but you get the full XBMC experience (with apps, themes, weather etc) instead of just a remote to control your "other" instance.
It's since become a stand-alone media app, installable on everything from the Apple TV to Linux. It plays everything you throw at it, keeps track of where you were up to when you last hit pause, and happily interconnects with all sorts of sources.