XBMC (Formely Known as Xbox Media Center) is basically a free and open source cross platform media centre to suit all your media needs. It is written in C and using some python. Comes with a large codec support so that you can play all your media files with ease. It outperforms the default media center. A lot of plugins and addons like BBC player, Radio, ESPN makes XBMC more additive. Using XBMC makes you forget all about the Operating System that is siting ideal, such that they are providing it as Live CD and Live USB.
XBMC has greater basic hardware requirements than a traditional 2D software applications, this basically means that it needs 3D capable GPU graphics hardware controller for all rendering; on the other hand, powerful 3D GPU chips are common today in most modern computers. It even plays pure 1080p media files using a core 2 duo processor using only the CPU power. Hardware accelerated video decoding using VDPAU is supported in XBMC 9.04 (and later) under Linux on Nvidia graphics hardware.
You can make a cool library by adding covers, description, fanart etc. It moreover supports network playback so you can stream media anywhere in your house or from the net using practically any protocol available.
XBMC is used as a application framework platform for others projects to base their media center software on, and today at least Boxee, MediaPortal, Plex, and Voddler are separate derivative products that are all known to initially have copied the GUI and media player parts of their software from XBMC’s source code.
XBMC features a Python Scripts Engine and WindowXML application framework (a XML-based widget toolkit for creating a GUI for widgets) in a similar to Apple Mac OS X Dashboard Widgets and Microsoft Gadgets in Windows Sidebar. Plugin scripts like Internet-TV and movie-trailer browsers, weather forecast, TV-guides, e-mail clients, instant messaging, scripts to front-end control PVR software and hardware, Internet-radio-station browsers, P2P file-sharing downloaders, IRC, also casual games such as Tetris, Snake, Space Invaders, Sudoku, and much more.
XBMC is distributed as a GPL and is developed by a global community, so there is lot to offer. Moreover it doesn’t require a high-end PC making it is easy to build a Economical HTPC. If you want a HTPC you got to have XBMC, The Ultimate one. The difficult to put all the feature of XBMC in words, to know it ,you got to experience it.
XBMC supports a lot of platforms, namely Windows, Mac, Linux, Apple TV and there are also Live versions.
and also dont forget to check out skins and plugins.
here is a site dedicated for all plugins and scripts.
Comments are closed.