XBMC Media Center

[Harrison]

Who has tried, or is using, XBMC?

If you don't know what this is, XBMC is a really cool media center. It was first developed as the XBMP (Xbox Media Player) dashboard for the original Xbox and has since been developed to run on Windows (XP/Vista), Mac, Linux (Ubuntu) and Xbox.

The website is http://xbmc.org/

This is a really cool media center front end and being completely free it is worth trying it just to see what it is like. I can guarantee it is better than Windows Media Center, and probably most other similar front ends you have tried. The Video player is especially nice with an initially simple control system, but with control panels to change settings for everything from aspect ratio, brightness and contrast, to any subtitles files you might have with the videos and to see offsets if they are not quite running in sync. And I really like the video stack feature. If you have a film split into multiple parts you can select stack and it will seamlessly stack them into a single sequence.

I'm currently setting it up on my spare Linux box with the plan to have it sitting connected to my amp to play music and videos.