XBMC a Media Center for the Masses - Part 1

Image via Wikipedia

The allure of a Media Center Computer (MCC) in the lounge room is born of fantasy and practicality.  The coolness of having all your music, movies and TV shows at your fingertips/remote is that of having an age old problem solved in the geekiest way possible.

From a practical point of view, having your DVD/Digital collection in a place away from where the young children can use them as ammunition in a battle for the best seat in the living room is always a plus.  The reduction of clutter down to one small box makes the wife happy.

The battle with the MCC is that, in most cases, the old DVD player is a lot easier to use and tends to be more reliable.  For example, I have most of the kids DVD's on the MCC, but my wife still tends to put on the actual DVD, rather than go through the hassle of turning on the MCC, waiting for it to boot up, navigating through to the Hi5 directory, just to have it reboot itself 10 minutes into the show because Windows needed to be updated.

I don't blame her, and I have done the same thing many times.  As cool and geeky as the idea of the MCC is, many times the execution can be less than smooth.

Image via CrunchBase

I have been looking at a couple of solutions, using a older P4 windows box I had lying around, but for some reason I haven't played with Xbox Media Center (XBMC).  I was reminded of XBMC when I tried to get into the Beta for Boxee which is built on XBMC.  So while I was waiting for Boxee, I thought I would give XBMC a try, and I'm happy I did.

Now just to clarify what I'm doing here, I'm looking for a solution for easy access to my digital media to my TV.  I'm not looking to set up a Tivo, or PVR, because on the whole, I don't like much television, you can look back at past posts for rants on that subject.  There are a few shows I download and there are kids DVD's and family DVD's that I have backed up onto the hard drive for reasons as mentioned before.

With that said, the feature list of XBMC looked like it would fit the bill, so began the adventure.

Image via Wikipedia

Install and Setup

Install was easy, as with most Windows applications.  XBMC runs on-top of the OS and works just like any other program.  The only trick you may need to pull is setting it up to launch on boot, so you don't need to try and find the icon and launch it manually.

I found the setup OK, though depending on the way you have your files named, you may find yourself doing a bit of adjusting to get all the meta info right.  And you will want to get that right, as it is great to be able to search your media collection by genre, director or actor.  Not to mention the extra plot info, and thumbnail and poster, so you can just flick through the files without needing to remember the file names.

Using and living with XBMC

XBMC is one of the easiest Media Centres I have used.  Its interface is a little bit busier than Apple's Front Row, but is far more intuitive than the other Windows based MC's I have played with.  It does seem to be more based around the the Library functionality for accessing and playing, which is much easier than the "folder and file" style that I was used to from my computing lifestyle.  I think that it is more suited to the lounge room.

The only real problems I had with XBMC related to running it on a Windows machine.  I put it on an XP machine which was spare.  The life of this box is to sit next to the TV and be ready to play the requested video.  But as with all MS boxes attached to the net, they are subject to the patching whims of their Operating Systems makers, and the reboots.

It is really annoying to sit down to a show and have the box reboot 10 minutes in, and it happens quite a bit.  That could say something about how often I get to sit down to watch TV, but it is also a major draw back for the whole computer in the living room.

Stay tuned for Part 2 *reboot* crap

Jason
"Have you turned it off and on again?"

Related articles by Zemanta

• Five Best Media Center Applications


• Boxee Goes Public, Adds MTV, Joost, and iPlayer Support [Media Center]