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One of the main reasons I was able to get rid of my monthly paid TV service was because I had a rather large amount of digital media stored on my HTPC. I had a standard windows XP computer with a few Terabytes of movies, TV shows, and music that I have collected over the years. I am an avid media ripper, and I always create digital backups/copies of any media that I buy. For the most part I don’t ever use the DVDs or CDs them self. I always play the digital copies.

The old way:

Music: At the time I had a lot of content and I was using several methods to play the content when I wanted it. First, I was using iTunes on my iMac to play my music. I had an iPhone at the time, and my brother has an iPod Touch so using iTunes was a good solution.

Videos: Like most people I have a plethora of movies and TV shows cataloged in a large messy folder structure. I knew where things were (most of the time) but it was impossible for others to fine anything. I was using VLC media player to play my videos and to stream some content over my network. This was a cumbersome, but acceptable streaming solution at the time.

Pictures: Flickr is the main place I keep photos, but I also have a lot of photos scattered all over my hard drive.

Keeping track: This was bad. I was using some folder structure to try and catalog 400 movies and another few hundred TV episodes. Something had to be done about it! Enter the White Knight on his trusty steed.

XBMC to the rescue!

I was in search for a multi-platform, free media center solution that was able to play all of my content, keep it organized, and make it easy to access when I, or someone else, wanted to play something. After checking out several solutions I steeled on Xbox Media Center. XBMC is an award-winning free and open source (GPL) software media player and entertainment hub for nearly all of your digital media. It is available for all major OS platforms including iOS devices like iPhone/iPad and AppleTV (first and 2^nd GEN). XBMC has been translated into over 30 languages.

So, all this sounds great, but what does it do that is so special?

I’m so glad you asked! XBMC does several things very well. First it plays any media, in any format under the sun, from any source. If you are like me, you have media in lots of different formats, ISO, AVI, DivX, MPEG, DVD, H.264, etc. XBMC can handle them all. I was going to include a complete list of all the supported formats in this article, but the list was so long, that all I can do is include this link to the XBMC wiki. It can also stream content from the internet. It has a plethora of add-ons or Plug-ins that can be downloaded and installed from directly inside the application. No downloading, copying to a folder, unzip, etc. It is all managed from inside the Add-on Manager. Some of the plug-ins include: Netflix, ESPN, CNN, Fox News, TWiT, Revision 3, Shoutcast Top 500, Last.FM and GroveShark as well as dozens of others. The plug-ins are written by regular users, who want to extend the uses of XBMC. The scripts are written in python. No special language to learn.

Recently XBMC has also integrated a front-end for MythTV PVR/DVR software. Now you can record manage and play Videos from your MythTV server in the same place you play all of your other media. How awesome is that?!

XBMC Add-on Manager

Okay, so it plays a lot of media. Tons of programs can do that. What’s the big deal?

XBMC isn’t just a media player. It is a full service media manager, player, and server all in one beautiful package. Once you add your media folders to XBMC, and tell it what time of media it is (TV, Music, Movies, Photos, Etc.) XBMC catalogs all of your media in a database and then uses ‘scrapers’ goes out to the internet and download all the data about each film or show. You can get DVD/CD Cover art, Fan art for each show and movie, as well as a synopsis of each film and that film’s IMDB rating all download automatically. This not only makes finding and going through your media so simple and smooth it also makes it easier to find something to watch. The Media Library also includes information about the file/format displayed right on the screen. It is 720p or 1080p? 16:9 resolution? AVI? DivX? Bluray? All the technical info is displayed discreetly alongside the films genre, runtime, year of release, and studio. Of course all of these are displayed different depending on what skin you choose. It even shows you the local weather on the home screen if you want it to. How thoughtful is that?

Aeon Skin Home Page

Transparicy! Theme Movie Browser

XBMC also can directly integrate with your Flicker or Photobucket accounts. It can stream your photos as a screen saver, or allow you to thumb through like a slide show. Nice for entertaining or kids birthday parties.

I know having a media center PC is a hassle when you have to get up and go to the keyboard all the time. Even a wireless keyboard or mouse can be clunky to have in the living room, so XBMC has support for IR remote controls. It also supports UPnP playback. This allows you to have a video on your cell phone or laptop and play itthrough XBMC onto your TV without transferring any files. All these features are designed to make life nice and easy.

Now it’s time to cover the most amazing, time saving, wonderful, boner-causing feature of them all. It can play media directly from a RAR/ZIP archive. No extracting needed!!! Let me say that one more time. You DON’T have to unRAR/unzip your media for XBMC to play it!

My Special Needs:

We all have special requirements that can make or break a software program in our environment. For me it was touch screen. I have a 15in Touch screen monitor I bought on ebay a few years back that is the control for my media center. So, the software that I use has to be touch friendly. Large buttons, easy navigation, no keyboard interaction needed (after setup), and it has to look nice both on my 15 in. monitor and on my 32 in. LCD TV. I will admit that not all of the skins are touch friendly. Some of the ones that I think look the best, are the hardest to use on a touch screen monitor. I personally use the MadiaStream Redux skin. It has large well defined selection menus, simple scrolling, and it look amazing on a large format TV. It is very customizable. You can change the skin, the menu items on the home screen, the view of your media, and they way it is displayed among a zillion other settings and tweaks that can really make this application yours if you want to. Leaving it stock is also a good choice since everything you need to make the most of your media is turned on from the get-go.

MediaStream Redux Theme Home Screen

Conclusion:

I would be naive to think that this program will fill the needs of everyone all the time. I know it won’t. But, if you are looking for amazingly well developed media center software that will provide robustness and a feature rich user experience then please give XBMC a try. XBMC has been the savior of my media collection and will continue to be the focal point of my home’s media playing.

For more information or to download please visit http://www.xbmc.org

Nick Hill is a systems administrator with 10+ years of experience in the I.T. field. His hobby/passion is to fully integrate all the features and conveniences of a monthly TV service into a full featured and fully on-demand home viewing experience without an outrageous monthly fee!