2008-02-17, 17:26
I fully agree with the idea of making XBMC a frontend that talks to a whole slew of Media backends. The future of home theater is heading towards every family having *something*, whether it's a TiVo, Vista Media Center, Windows Home Server, MythTV, NAS, or just a PC with a samba share -- the more sources XBMC can talk to, the better.
Now the whole industry push for uPnP was supposed to solve all this, with uPnP being the common language that all devices can speak. And to an extent, it's done fairly well (most frontends and backends on the market speak uPnP).
The problem is that uPnP doesn't support the type of advanced interaction required for things like scheduling recordings, things specific to the backend's functionality.
XBMC is by far the best frontend on the planet -- the more backends it can natively support where uPnP isn't enough -- the better.
As stated before, for me, MythTV is the golden feature. Once cmyth/gmyth is ready (with commercial skipping ;P) I'll post a pic of 5 XBMC's running concurrently in our house.
Now the whole industry push for uPnP was supposed to solve all this, with uPnP being the common language that all devices can speak. And to an extent, it's done fairly well (most frontends and backends on the market speak uPnP).
The problem is that uPnP doesn't support the type of advanced interaction required for things like scheduling recordings, things specific to the backend's functionality.
XBMC is by far the best frontend on the planet -- the more backends it can natively support where uPnP isn't enough -- the better.
As stated before, for me, MythTV is the golden feature. Once cmyth/gmyth is ready (with commercial skipping ;P) I'll post a pic of 5 XBMC's running concurrently in our house.