Hey,

So I’m back. It’s been a long time, but I didn’t come back empty handed.
Tonight I decided to share with you some of my current projects - home projects.
As the title suggests, it’s XBMC.
For those of you who don’t know what that is: it’s a media center application.

Of course, I can go on and on about the greatness of the idea of having all of your media in one place, while browsed via remote control on your big screen TV, with the sound of your living room speakers and receiver, but I guess it would be too long, plus too many people have already done this, so I won’t bore you with it now.

I do know though, that a lot of people have never even heard about it, and what is even more amazing, is that those people are not grandmothers and housewives, but the very high-tech professionals, like most of us here.

But for now, let me just say that XBMC is not the only option, but one of them. There are at least a dozen of applications with the same goal, and I’ve tried most of them. The conclusion I came to - there are two that are simple enough for the average user and fully functional. That’s Mediaportal and XBMC.
I actually had Mediaportal for a couple of years installed, but since the latest linux beta of XBMC came out - I decided to make the switch. One reason for it was that Mediaportal is a windows application, written in .Net, meaning it will not be available to linux users in the near future.  Second reason is that it doesn’t have its own codecs, but instead is built around the awful Windows Media Player. And while I’m sure it integrates good and everything, it’s kind of a problem to debug it later, when the crashes begin - where do they come from? Is it the application, is it the ffdshow codecs, is it the media player, or just Windows itself?

I’m not saying Linux is easier to debug, but I guess I’d rather debug Linux than Windows
Plus I installed the Live CD version, as it’s a dedicated PC.
Anyway, you can find all the info on their website.
What I’m here to tell you tonight is the process of my setup.
YMMV if you have other hardware - please be aware of that.
So let’s begin.