Kodi Community Forum

Hi, I'm new here. I'm also completely new to XBMC, and all HTPC software tbh.

I'm trying to make a setup for someone where simplicity is key, I dont mind putting some time into setting it up so the setup process doesnt neccesarily have to be easy.

I've heard W7 MCE might be a good way to go, but I've heard so much good about XBMC I wanted to give it a try. It will pretty much only be used to tv shows and movies playback, I might throw in a few cool plugins depending on what there is that doesnt make the user experience more complex.

The pc is an asrock ion 330. It will be used as a regular office pc and then as a side function I wanted to install some htpc setup on it. It'd be ideal to be able to fire up XBMC (or other front-end) with a single key press on an universal remote.

I read on another forum that the win version of XBMC doesnt support hardware acceleration. It'll probably mostly be playing xvid/dvd, and the odd 720p, but in case one would need 1080p playback would I run into issues here? Would I be better off waiting for the new final version of XBMC, which I believe isnt too far away?

The remote I've been looking at is:
http://cgi.ebay.com/SONY-RMVL600-RM-VL60...45efc7a599

and then I'll probably just pick up some cheap IR receiver. I've not played around with setting up universal remotes either in the past, my question is, will it be possible to teach one "learning" remote like the one above to work very well with XBMC? Again, I dont mind spending some time doing it. Any keyboard-remote device is out of questions, this setup really has to be simple to use.

Any input is greatly appreciated. And thanks to all you great devs that brings us apps like this for FREE.

Dont see any problems except that you will have problems with HD material, but eventually XBMC will be hardware accelerated under windows.

Thanks for your reply. Is it hard to apply an update of XBMC when the new version comes out? Would I have to reconfig it all again?

I'm definitely gonna give XBMC a whirl, if the system isnt powerful enough for it without hardware acceleration I'll just go with something else in the meantime.

Anyone have any suggestions of skins/plugins to use just to point me in the right direction? I definitely got a lot of reading and playing around to do.

Any other opinions are very welcome too.

For a start I would just install XBMC and try it out in the default state. The default skin Confluence is very nice and easy to navigate. I would just experiment with the default skin, set it up how you want, get the library going for your media and generally just use it for a few days to see how you like it.

Updating XBMC is easy. Just install over your existing install. I do however, recommend backing up your profile folder just in case.

As blittan said, HD material is gonna be problematic for you because of the Asrock. 1080p is pretty much a no go with XBMC right now with the Asrock. Some 720p is playable though.

Lots of work arounds for XBMC in this regard. You can use an external player, or try out a linux build which can use VDAPU for hardware acceleration. Plenty of threads in the forums about each method.

Anyways, welcome. Hope you enjoy XBMC.

I would buy an official Microsoft MCE remote from eBay. It will be nmore expensive that that Sony remote, but it's easy to make it work with both XBMC and Media center. See the readme in http://www.ratsauce.plus.com/mceremote.zip for why I like the MS remote.

JR

benandjerry Wrote:Thanks for your reply. Is it hard to apply an update of XBMC when the new version comes out? Would I have to reconfig it all again?

No, it's no problem at all. You just install the new version over the old one and voila! it's updated All settings are saved. Make sure to choose to put the config files in Roaming dir. (Default option in the installer)

blittan Wrote:Dont see any problems except that you will have problems with HD material, but eventually XBMC will be hardware accelerated under windows.

I saw at the Boxee site, that their new beta will support hardware acceleration under Windows - which is quite strange as they build on top of XBMC...?

Varming Wrote:I saw at the Boxee site, that their new beta will support hardware acceleration under Windows - which is quite strange as they build on top of XBMC...?

Not that strange, since they have fulltime developers doing things for them. This will be backported to XBMC just as the DX stuff was earlier (also developed first by boxee) Which we are very grateful for. The spirit of open source

joshuass Wrote:...
As blittan said, HD material is gonna be problematic for you because of the Asrock. 1080p is pretty much a no go with XBMC right now with the Asrock. Some 720p is playable though...

Hey guys,

what about the xbmc build with dsplayer!?

Its GPU acceleration is working flawlessly with 1080p mkv on my Zotac MAG on Win7 (and XP before) and should do that with the asrock ION too... I only set the available RAM for IGP up to 512MB in bios, thats it.

Thank you so much guys for all your replies, please keep the discussion going!

I got a lot of reading up to do, that dsplayer sollution surely sounds interesting. Linux is out of the question though, need windows for other non htpc purposes.

I'll have a look at the mce remote too, although I'd still prefer the universal as I got the impression it'll be easier (both usage and setup) and better feature wise to use with other devices.

I'll try to get some time over to play around with this, but you know christmas times.....

Hi,

Hope you all had good holidays.

I've been playing around a little bit with XBMC now and got it working with external player.

But I have one problem, it will play all media in same player (either built in, or mpc-hc/kmplayer). I want it to play everything but HD content that may require gpu decoding in the built in player.

I cant for the life of me figure out whats wrong in my playercorefactory file. I realize the name isnt exactly matching the player in the file below but been switching around between them just for testing purposes. The below config makes it load all videos in mpc-hc. If I add <rule video="true" player="dvdplayer" /> before in the rules it will play all videos in built in player. I also tried to make a rule with filenames="*720p*|*1080p*" instead of filetype mkv as it is now but its still the same. It plays everything in the same player....

benandjerry Wrote:I cant for the life of me figure out whats wrong in my playercorefactory file. I realize the name isnt exactly matching the player in the file below but been switching around between them just for testing purposes. The below config makes it load all videos in mpc-hc. If I add <rule video="true" player="dvdplayer" /> before in the rules it will play all videos in built in player. I also tried to make a rule with filenames="*720p*|*1080p*" instead of filetype mkv as it is now but its still the same. It plays everything in the same player....

Code:

<playercorefactory>
  <players>
    <player name="KMPlayer" type="ExternalPlayer" audio="false" video="true">
      <filename>C:\test\mpc-hc.exe</filename>
      <args>"{1}" /fullscreen /close</args>
      <hidexbmc>false</hidexbmc>
      <hideconsole>false</hideconsole>
      <warpcursor>none</warpcursor>
    </player>
  </players>
  <rules action="prepend">
    <rule filetypes="mkv" player="KMPlayer"/>
  </rules>
</playercorefactory>

you gotta clean this up: is c:\test\mpc-hc.exe the REAL path to your MPC-HC.EXE file? Is it KMPlayer or MPC you're trying to use? I understand you're testing, but it's confusing that you don't have this straightened out. Get rid of your video=true rule, it's completely borking everything else up. You're basically saying, "If the media file contains video, then use DVDPlayer (XBMC's built-in player) to play it."

here's what works for me:


KEEP IN MIND THE FOLLOWING:
I'm using Win7x64, so Program Files path is "Program Files (x86)"
Playercorefactory.xml should be in USERDATA folder
I've set my rule for MPC to play AVC/H264 content, which usually chokes an ION.

Thanks, code was fine as it was though, I found the issue. Had an old advancedsettings.xml lying around overruling the rules. Clumsy me....

So now I'm going to try to config it to make the skin really user friendly. First thing I was thinking of, I got my media in separate sub folders.
After I added a library, is there any way to have XBMC launch the media files inside a folder just by clicking the folder, instead of entering the folder and then having to click the media files inside to actually launch the movie?

I'm using the default skin included in XBMC.

yes XBMC is the best front-end I've had the joy to use

I now use it as a front end though as I find video playback (in Windows anyway) of better quality using MPC-HC as an external player