Hi,
I've been using XBMC on a XBox for years and it has served me well. Especially as we've been moving to different countries a lot the last couple of years, not only could we watch whatever we wanted whenever we wanted (duh), but also play our music over the tv speakers.
Only thing is, the XBox is getting to the end of it's lifetime and as we're moving to central asia within a few months, i thought it better to replace it now.
So i'm looking into options and think i just buy parts and build a PC myself. But then i started wondering: why would i want to keep on using XBMC?
- we hardly ever keep what we watch (ie most is deleted after we've seen it)
- we don't care much about the quality; i think our tv is HD capable, but HD quality doesn't run on our XBox and the avarage quality of xvid's we watch tends to be good enough (in the sense we don't percieve it as being 'bad' or 'worse than'); As the DVD player in the XBox is broken, we've not watched any DVD's for the last year or so and don't really miss it either; again an avi usually is good enough.
- the hifi stuff is being shipped over, so no need for an audio library/audio device
On the other hand, simply running windows with VLC full screen would probably work just as well. Moreover, lately i have run into a couple of avi's which don't play on the XBox, but do play on the PC. But that probably is remedied with a new version of XBMC on an up-to-date system.
Come to think of it, the only really big advantage of XBMC over VLC is A/V/Subtitles sync, which is really easy to adjust with XBMC and a bit harder with VLC.
Just being curious on your thoughts. Why do you keep using the extra XBMC software layer on top of your OS?
Cheers,
BobbyR
BTW: it is likely i'll end up running XBMC anyway for the simple reason i like how it looks.
The look, feel and usability.
BobbyRay Wrote:Why do you keep using the extra XBMC software layer on top of your OS?
Because it does everything I want and using a remote to control it is just kickass! And since it's based on ffmpeg it pretty much plays anything you throw at it. Not to mention that you can customize it a lot with themes and add-ons.
tl;dr: It roxors my boxors!
i got it setup nicely with sickbeard so its just easy to use and is always updated.
My main reason for using XBMC is so I could centralise my media library and provide access to my housemates over the network at home.
As my housemates are not so PC savvy XBMC provides a nice and simple to use interface where they are less likely to break things, it's also nicer to browse through the library and have the media information available to aid the decision process, rather than scroll through a file listing and then manually searching for information about movies if you have no idea what it's about.
I'm running Archlinux on my HTPC in console mode and XBMC is great with ability to run with
its own window manager.
So that, if you run XBMC in standalone mode then, you don't need any additional graphical environments such as OpenBox or Gnome, but just X server.
It is possible only in Linux.
I use it because I bought a seagate Theater+ which plays the movies fine but it only works with a usb drive :\. Plus the interface is very bad. I know use the theater+'s on my basement and bedroom tvs. since it will browse the network and play movies fine but my 5yr old cant read yet and giving him the option to look at the cover art is great.
Thanks,
SoBBie
The main draws for me (all of equal importance):
1.) Polished UI with detailed metadata/posters/fanart.
2.) Access to all media, local and streaming.
3.) Unified UI everywhere in the house, even with a mix of devices.
4.) Extremely low deployment costs compared to off-the-shelf CE products with similar capabilities.
I was initially drawn to XBMC for reasons 1 and 4. I used to be a major DVD collector with a collection of over 1000 discs. I fell in love with the Kaleidescape concept but the hardware ($10k for a server, $700 - $4000 per client) is astronomically out of my price range. This lead me to looking for other options.
The first option I played around with was pyTiVo, mainly because we already had Tivo HD boxes in the Theater and Master Bedroom. This did give access to video files stored on a PC, but required on-the-fly transcoding by the PC and lacked random access (content was being transferred to the TiVo, not streamed). This was a working stop-gap solution but not sustainable for easy access to a large media collection.
The first truly serviceable option I found was WDTV Live boxes around the house pulling content from my desktop PC acting as a server. This wet my appetite and worked extremely well for basic organization and playback. Even the interface was decent once the device was updated to support cover-art. That said, organization and cover-art was still almost completely manual and metadata/fanart was not supported at all without some extensive hacking.
After turning a friend on to the WDTV Live, he took things a step further and introduced me to XBMC. Our interest in XBMC initially came as trying to make our WDTV Lives function in a similar manner. We were able to achieve this to a certain degree by automating scraping through Tvixie, MediFire, etc. This was still far from a hands-off approach. My friend actually jumped-ship to XBMC first since his media was nearly all SD and he had a spare P4 PC laying around that could handle SD playback without problem. I stuck with the WDTV Live because I had much more HD content, but with Christmas coming up, we both moved to more powerful AMD/NVidia based HTPCs (Acer Aspire AX1301) running XBMC 9.11 Camelot on our main screens (my Theater, his Living Room), but continued using the WDTV Live boxes on our secondary screens.
My first move to multi-room XBMC came with the release of the Ion based Acer Revo. I acquired a Revo AR3610 well below MSRP and quickly set it up to run a post-9.11 nightly supporting DXVA for use in the Master Bedroom. The uniform UI in the Theater and Master Bedroom was nice, but these were still two completely independent instances of XBMC with no sharing of coverart, metadata, fanart, etc. This is where my multi-room setup stagnated. Even with the lower end Revos available as low as $200, it was still too expensive to justify on our 3rd and 4th screens (Kids’ Bedroom, Living Room). For nearly a year my setup didn’t change, churning along on Camelot in both rooms with no need to update what was working well enough.
The catalyst that renewed my interest in expanding XBMC around the house was an Engadget article on XBMC development for the ATV2. At $100/client it now made a lot more sense to not only expand to the 3rd and 4th screens, but to standardize on a small low-power device for all secondary screens. Thanks to the Revo AR3610 no longer being available, it demanded a premium over what I originally payed allowing me to sell it and cover the cost of 2 x ATV2 boxes (Master Bedroom, Kids’ Room) as well as a Netgear WNDR3400 router which allowed me to move all of my media away from an always-on PC based server to a 2tb USB drive connected directly to the router. The jailbreaking and installation of XBMC couldn’t have been any easier. I’ve even been considering replacing the HTPC in the theater with the ATV2, but that is my primary screen and I will likely eventually upgrade to a from my 720p projector to a 1080p model (possibly with 3D), so for now I’m holding on to the HTPC for future flexibility.
For the 4th screen I cobbled together an HTPC out of scrounged spare parts including an old P4 desktop, 8400GS PCI video card, and hard drive from a dead TiVo S2. This was mainly meant as a stop-gap until refurb ATV2s came back in stock, but since this machine resides in a cabinet under a CRT TV and is the least watched device in the house, I’m not overly motivated to upgrade it (plus it runs solid and is indistinguishable from the other devices in practice).
Now, with four instances of XBMC running a fresh new UI (pre-Eden Horizontal Confluence) pulling media from dedicated network storage (instead of the office desktop pulling dual-duty)I decided it was time to start work on synchronization from client-to-client. I decided to follow the Lifehacker model, first tackling coverart/fanart/metadata and then wading into the waters of a MySQL server. So far I’ve completed phase 1 through the use of Ember. The MySQL server is the next step and is just awaiting a free weekend that I can dedicate (i.e. the wife is out of the house).
Along with this renewed interest in XBMC has come renewed activity in the forum. I basically skipped 10.0 and 10.1 all together and dove straight into pre-Eden since that was what installed to the ATV2 boxes by default. As such I’ve been learning about add-ons, repositories, etc. Through this process I’ve also found a lot of great new sources for streaming contend within XBMC…. mainly add-ons for Icefilms, Hulu, FreeCable, etc. Icefilms adds a new source of content, while the Hulu and FreeCable plugins simply add native support for sources I was previously accessing through PlayOn.
I haven’t discussed cost, but it’s played a big part in the path I’ve taken. The toughest pill to swallow was the main HTPC. At the time there were no cheap clients available. The Revo had just come out and both Windows DXVA and Linux/Live Ion driver integration weren’t quite there. So, I went with an off-the-shelf HTPC with a processor powerful enough to software decode my media, but also included a DXVA capable GPU that could be utilized once XBMC support matured. I also originally planned on adding a BD drive (I like eliminating consolidating devices), so a full-blown PC was much preferred. The BD integration has since slipped on my priority list, mainly because I just don’t watch physical discs that often. Cost was also the main reason I waited to deploy XBMC throughout the rest of the house. Thankfully the ATV2 made that a much better value proposition.
In total, I have 4 clients with a diverse home network (wired Ethernet, 802.11n, PowerlineAV) and network attached storage and I’ve spent less than $900 on hardware:
Clients
Theater – Acer AX1301-U9052 HTPC+ RC6 USB IR – $412
Master Bedroom – AppleTV 2 – $100
Kids’ Bedroom – AppleTV 2 - $80 (refurbished)
Living Room – P4 HTPC + 8400GS + RC6 USB IR – $42 (video card + IR)
Network & Storage
Router – Netgear WNDR3400 – $40
PowerlineAV Kit #1 – Netgear XAVB1004 – $100
PowerlineAV Kit #2 – Netgear XAVB101 – $60
USB Hard Drive – WD Elements 2TB – $80
There are obviously things I didn’t consider in the above costs, mainly remote controls. I use Harmony remotes throughout the house on anything other than a standalone TV… I have a Harmony 900 in the Theater, 600 in the Master Bedroom, and 650 in the Living Room. I love the Harmony remotes and would have purchased these regardless of the fact that they make XBMC control a piece of cake. In fact, I already had the 900 before ever starting XBMC and picked up the 600 and 650 for the other rooms when they first came out. In the Kids’ Bedroom, the ATV2 remote is just so dead simple we stick with it.
The above simply expounds on my main point… XBMC allows me to access all media types, local and streaming, with a polished UI containing metadata/fanart/coverart on multiple devices throughout the house with low cost off-the-shelf hardware. The only other setup I can think of that would allow this functionality would be PlexServer, but that route would require a notably different hardware arrangement (likely a Mac Mini in the Theater running the server and client, with ATV2s or Roku Boxes as clients everywhere else). Any other software package (MediaPortal, MCE, SageTV) would not come close to offering the inexpensive clients and wide platform support of XBMC.
Thank you all for your input. I didn't need convincing, but it's good to get confirmation anyway.
BobbyR
I use xbmc because its just a great program and its open source. I have looked at other media center programs and not one comes close to xbmc on customization. Also I love the way it integrates with sickbeard, couch potato and now headphones. I have cancelled my cable and just use xbmc for its streaming addons which provide enough content for all the family including kids.
Its Free, Its very well supported, Its slick and clean, it simply rocks on my 58" Plasma.
Its so simple that my 5year old can find the moves he wants because he can identify the pictures and push the play button.
I have been using it since early days of xbmc with Xbox u can see my join date is 2005. I tested many media players but non of them do what xbmc does !
And non of them can make u happy once u used to have xbmc !
So if u want some thing cheap get an atv2 and run xbmc on it, or u can still get an expensive pc or .... Without xbmc, but u will never forget the touch and feel of xbmc and u will be back very soon!
cause its the best media centre. iv also used it since around 04 and everything else iv seen seems to just copy xbmc but they're always 2+yrs too late.
I can download files automaticly using utorrent rss feeds and then have xbmc put it in my library keeping the original files without unraring. I can then go to xbmc and check out whats new in my library.
if I were to use VLC I would need to unrar my files, then I need to keep both files since I need the rar files still to seed my download, and I agree with every other reason posted here.
I would like to say thank you to the xbmc team this program is the best.
joemm210 Wrote:if I were to use VLC I would need to unrar my files,
Actually VLC can play RAR files now.