XBMC is a popular and eye catching media center hub that translate your every day entertainment on you laptop to something worth spending time doing. XBMC is available for Linux, OSX, and Windows. Currently XBMC can be used to play almost all popular audio and video formats around. It was designed for network playback, so you can stream your multimedia from anywhere in the house or directly from the internet using practically any protocol available.
XBMC can play CDs and DVDs directly from the disk or image file, almost all popular archive formats from your hard drive, and even files inside ZIP and RAR archives. It will even scan all of your media and automatically create a personalized library complete with box covers, descriptions, and fanart. There are playlist and slideshow functions, a weather forecast feature and many audio visualizations. Once installed, your computer will become a fully functional multimedia jukebox.
XBMC is a highly portable open source media center application with a sophisticated library management system. It indexes the user’s video content and provides an intuitive remote-friendly user interface for browsing and playing media. XBMC and its derivatives, such as Boxee and Plex, are popular among home theater PC users.
The developers behind the XBMC project have released a major new version of the program. XBMC 11, which is codenamed Eden, brings better performance, broader platform support, theming enhancements, and a number of other improvements. In addition to supporting Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X, the XBMC developers have extended the media player to several mobile and embedded systems. With the release of XBMC 11, the iOS and Apple TV ports are now officially supported alongside the desktop versions. The iOS port was previously available, but it’s now more closely aligned with the desktop version.
XBMC has a completely new live CD environment called XBMCbuntu. It’s built on top of Ubuntu, a popular Linux distribution. The live CD boots directly to a fully-functional XBMC environment. It also comes with the LXDE desktop environment and several applications, including the Chromium Web browser and a terminal. Users can access the underlying desktop environment by quitting XBMC and logging in with an XBMCbuntu session.
