Kodi Community Forum

Forgive me if this a noobish question, but I have an htpc setup with xbmcbuntu running and I was wondering if there is a way to create a menu which would be able to run in the background that would allow for seemless switching between XBMC and Boxee.

Here is what I am thinking.

When you boot your machine, it would go through the normal boot process, then auto login to X. At This point a menu would pop up before any programs are started. The menu would contain a list of programs that you have specified during the setting up of your machine. For example have XBMC and Boxee. Let say you select XBMC. XBMC would open and you go in and watch a few videos, listen to music or whatever you wanted to do, but then you decide you want to watch a movie from netflix or listen to pandora, so you need or want to switch over to Boxee. You would then be able to press a button and launch the initial menu that opened when you first booted. This would allow you to select Boxee and then it would open Boxee.

I'm no expert so I'm not sure how this could be done, but I know it's possible. Maybe it could be a small program that is set to autostart.

Since I am not a programmer, I have no idea how this could be implemented and whether or not the program you switch from would close after you switch.

I don't even know if this is a feature anyone wants, but I have a use for it, so I'm sure someone else does as well.

Good idea, but being slightly lazy I just do this:

I autologin by default into XBMC. If I want to switch to Boxee, I exit XBMC (which brings me to a timed login screen) I then click Options > Change Session > Boxee and then login as my xbmc user again. This time it runs Boxee. To add Boxee to your sessions list just find your XBMC.desktop file and copy it to Boxee.desktop and edit it to run Boxee instead of XBMC.

I always found doing this via LIRC to be very simple and straight forward. The added benefit is that your TV becomes a giant picture frame if you leave it on and nothing is running.

I've mapped a few keys that use irexec to launch some scripts. I've made a script before that switches between boxee and xbmc. I think I've posted near complete instructions on here before if you're interested. Just search my posts.

anyone have a setup like keeganl describes? would love to have to option on ubuntu to change from xbmc to boxee and vice versa by just using the remote.