XBMC is a fantastic and free cross-platform media center application we’re nuts for. If you’ve wanted to start using it or just wanted to customize the XBMC installation you’re already running, this guide will walk you through everything, from installation to total customization. More »
Media center – XBMC – XBMC Media Center – Microsoft Windows – Operating Systems
I love messing with settings and geeky file-sharing programs. My spouse doesn’t, but digs Hulu and appreciates free. So I set up a media center that satisfies my geek cravings but is actually easy-to-use for non-nerds. Here’s what I pieced together. More »
Ed. note: We love a good media center almost as much as we love automation, so self-confessed media geek Alex Ward’s fully automated media center caught our eye. It’s all the benefits of an awesome media center without all the hassle.
A few weeks ago I wrote a post about how to use EventGhost to begin to automate your PC. Now we are going to take things a step forward and use EventGhost alongside a few other free programs to set up an amazing and fully automated Home Theatre PC.
If you have not read my previous EventGhost article I advise you to go and read it now as I am going to skip past the basics here.
To truly get this working properly you are going to need a few programs; they are all free and fairly straightforward to use (but I’m going to show you how anyway), so get to work on the list below and let me know when you have it all downloaded and installed.
The biggest difficulty a lot of people seem to face when they first set XBMC up is getting the library mode to work; this is because XBMC needs to have a specific file structure in order to scrape (download information about) your media files.
Note: I’m going to work on the assumption that you have a hard drive set up just for your media, if you do not then create a folder on one of your drives and do all this in the root of that folder.
Firstly create the following folders:
TV Shows, Music, Photos, Movies, Unsorted Media
There are some things that XBMC does not scrape all that well or simply things you would like to be able to access in XBMC but don’t really want it to be categorised as a TV show or movie, in this instance you should also create a folder for that (E.g., Documentaries, Children’s TV shows, etc…)
Prepare your movies
The Movies folder should not directly contain any files; each movie should be in a folder which has the movie’s name and year as its title. The movie file itself should be the movie’s title, if it is a HD movie then you can also add that information to the file name:
E.g. /Movies/The Shawshank Redemption [1994]/The.Shawshank.Redemption.720p.BluRay.mkv
Setting up your TV Shows folder
The TV Shows folder follows a similar format; each show should have a folder with its name and year as the title and each series of a show should go inside a ‘series x' folder. The name of each file should be the name of the show followed by the series number and episode number, if you wish you can also add the title of the episode:
E.g. /TV Shows/Life on Mars [2008]/Series 1/Life on Mars – s01e01 – The Crash.avi
Make sure you format the series and episode numbers using the above example, this method always works for the main scrapers. The year is not essential for movies or TV shows, it just makes it simpler for the scraper to make sure it’s downloading the information for the correct title.
Setting up your music folder
The music folder should contain a folder for the artist and then a folder for each album inside it.:
E.g. /Music/Fleetwood Mac/Rumours/
The year should not be needed for albums as it’s rare that an artist will use the same album name more than once.
Setting up the other folders
Photos are simple to categorise as they do not get scraped—therefore you can put any pictures you like in there without worrying about file structure.
The unsorted media folder should be empty.
Copying your media
At this stage you are ready to copy your media to the folders. If you have thumbnail or fanart files already you don’t need to copy them over (unless you know the scraper will have trouble finding them) as this will be taken care of later.
XBMC has a great scraping tool; however it is quite slow and if you re-install your media centre for any reason you will have to re-scrape all your files again from scratch. Ember Media Manager is faster and even better, it downloads all the needed files to the movies folder, so if you do need to reinstall, no re-scrape is required (plus it downloads trailers – which is just awesome).
To set it up, go to ‘edit > settings', click ‘Files and Sources' then ‘add source' and browse to the root of your movies folder. (This can be done during setup as well, so you may not need to do it now). I won't tell you which boxes need ticking as it is all about personal preference really.
Once that's done, return to the main menu and click ‘update library' (although I think this happens automatically the first time anyway). Once your list appears, select ‘Scrape Media > New Movies > Automatic > All items' and watch it find everything for you (Note: If you did not add the year to the folder names then you may get odd results on some movies using ‘automatic', use ‘ask' instead).
If you use the ‘automatic’ mode then this should be the last time you ever see this screen as we will automate it in a later step.
Before we start this please make sure you have your torrent program set up to send all completed downloads to your ‘unsorted media’ folder. (Note: You can use your existing downloads folder if you wish, just make sure that it’s only updated when the download has completed)
TED is a simple Java application which automatically finds your favourite TV shows and starts downloading them. It’s fairly simple to set up, but here is a little tutorial anyway.
Once the program is installed, click on ‘add show'. You will then be presented with the ‘Add show' window. Simply select the show you want to download and choose the episode you want to download from (this doesn't work that well for older episodes). Once this is done, select the episode and click ‘Edit show'.
The default settings are ok for the most part, however, I find that I get better results if I make a few tweaks. Firstly in ‘Feeds' click on ‘+' and add IsoHunt, select ‘yes' when the dialog box pops up and then click on ‘filters', change the top number to 300mb and the maximum size to 1200mb (this means you won't get low quality files and you might get the odd HD one—if you don't want HD, then set the max to about 750mb). Don't bother with ‘download in HD quality' as it's not perfect and usually results in no torrents being found for a lot of shows.
Once you have done that, just rinse and repeat until you’ve added all the shows you want.
Note: If you do not want TED to automatically open your torrent application (like if you download on a schedule) then you can change the options in Extra > Preferences.
Sadly many files on BitTorrent have not been named with media centres in mind and most scrapers are rubbish unless the file names and folders follow their rules. Thankfully a fantastic application called ‘The Renamer’ exists to solve this problem.
This program is very easy to set up and even easier to use. Firstly, click on ‘settings’ then change your fetch folder to your ‘unsorted media’ folder and the TV shows archive to your ‘TV Shows’ folder.
Make sure the following boxes are ticked
And that’s it!
Ed. note: If you routinely download subtitles for your television shows or movies, make sure to grab the subtitles before renaming. Subtitles packages are timing-based—down to the millisecond specific!—and one subtitle package for a TV show is not the same as any other package.
Ok, so far we’ve managed to get a series of systems together to download and catalogue our TV Shows and organise our movies to be imported into XBMC. Now it’s time to make it automatic using EventGhost.
Firstly we need to install two plugins to EventGhost. ‘Directory Watcher’ and ‘XBMC’, you can find these in the ‘Plugins’ menu (see the small image to the left). To ensure that your movies are scraped automatically as well, install two copies of ‘Directory Watcher’
Set the first Directory Watcher Plugin to look in your ‘unsorted media’ folder and the second to look in your ‘Movies’ folder. Then create a new macro called ‘move new shows’
Inside this macro set it to automatically launch the renamer (System > Start Application), in the command line box type ‘–fetch' and set the window options to ‘minimised' (this never seems to work for me but you may have more luck. Then – still inside the same macro – add another action below it, ‘Update Video Library' from the XBMC folder.
Now create a new macro called ‘scrape new movies', set it to open ember media manager and in the command line box enter ‘–newauto –all' (remember this is only foolproof if you add years to your movie directories). Then – still inside the same macro – add another action below it, ‘Update Video Library' from the XBMC folder.
Finally add an event called ‘DirectoryWatcher.Updated’ to the top of the first macro and one called ‘DirectoryWatcher2.Updated’ to the top of the second and save your configuration.
The last step to make sure everything is automated is to create shortcuts to uTorrent and TED in your Windows start-up folder.
Note: This step assumes you are using at least version 9.11 of XBMC and are using the default skin
Firstly let’s add our media files. Go to ‘video’s and select Add Source, browse to your ‘Movies’ folder and press enter, the source should automatically be called ‘movies’.
Then click on ‘Set content’, under ‘This directory contains’, select ‘movies’ and set the scraper to the one of your choosing (the default themoviedb.org is pretty good as it is), under scanning options only select ‘use folder names for lookups’ Under ‘settings’ you are presented with a number of options, these are completely up to you, for the most part Ember Media Manager will have taken care of them anyway.
Once this is done, do the same things again for TV shows, obviously this time select ‘TV shows’ instead of ‘Movies’. I recommend thetvdb.org as your scraper. Don’t tick any of the boxes and once again the options in the ‘settings’ panel are up to you (although I find ‘use DVD’ order to be more chronological than the ‘Absolute order’ setting).
Note: If you created directories for video media you do not want to be catalogued, add them in the same way, but under ‘this directory contains’ set it to ‘none’.
Adding sources to the music and pictures menus is a similar procedure, however, you do not need to specify any settings.
Now we need to tweak some settings to make sure everything works ok, so from the home screen go to ‘System’, in the system menu select ‘Video’ and check all the options under ‘Library’; then do exactly the same for ‘Music’. Then go back to the main ‘System’ page and select ‘Skin’ under the ‘home window options’ menu, the top four options should be checked and the rest are optional, just make sure to deselect the ‘hide movies’ and ‘hide tv show’ options.
Once this is done, restart XBMC and watch all your media pour in. Your TV shows will now automatically download as soon as they are released and they will be automatically catalogued and added to your media centre. All downloaded movies will remain in your ‘Unsorted Media’ Folder but as soon as you move them to ‘Movies’ they will be found and catalogued by Ember and XBMC, You can use the ‘recently’ added box on XBMC to see what new media you have to watch.
You knew that nothing this amazing was going to come without problems, didn’t you? The main issue this method has is that it’s terrible for seeding torrents. So far the only foolproof method around this I have found is that instead of setting your torrent program to move downloaded torrents to the ‘unsorted media’ folder, it’s better to copy them there instead. That way you can keep your ratios up without having to wait for the torrent to reach 1:1 before watching your media. Obviously, this removes some of the automation and you have copies of files on your hard drive until you delete the seeded copy so it’s not perfect.
The other issue is that whilst TED is brilliant, it's not without its flaws—sometimes it cannot find some episodes for shows. So far the only way around this is to tell TED to skip to the next episode and download it manually (fiddling with the filters can sometimes work but often it's a problem with the program and you'll have to wait for an update to fix it).
If you have any questions, please leave them in the comments.
Alex Ward is a Yorkshire based web developer and self-confessed ‘media geek’; he has an obsession with automation and home cinema systems and when he isn’t messing around with computers, he enjoys cooking for his friends.
Ed. note: We’ve shown you how to automatically download your favorite TV shows before, but even if you’ve got your downloads automated perfectly, there’s still a little matter of organization. Productive Geek forum member ejf071189 details how he automates his TV-download organization.
I used to use uTorrent’s RSS feature to automatically download shows via this guide (see “How do I use the RSS feed in my client ?”). This allowed me to automatically have shows downloaded into appropriate folders, which are monitored by XMBC which scrapes thetvdb.com to add the shows to its own library. While XBMC was able to identify episode information with the naming system the torrents used, I preferred to have the episodes better organized using TVRename. Every so often I would run TVRename and scan my library for files that had to be renamed and rename them.
There were problems with this method, though. The obvious problem was that I would have to remember to run TVRename, which really wasn’t that big a deal. The bigger problem was that depending on when XBMC scanned my TV folder for new media, if the files were renamed with TVRename, XBMC would then have to rescan the file with the new name, leading to dead files and dupes in library view.
Here’s the method I used to resolve the issue:
1. Download TVRename 2.1.1a6 here. The 2.1.1 line of TVRename is the only one that supports command line arguments. The 2.2 alphas are supposed to have this feature reimplemented but development is currently on hiatus.
2. Reconfigure utorrent’s RSS feature to download all shows to a folder outside of the folders XBMC monitors. This could be a generic download folder or a subfolder called “Unsorted TV Shows,” for example.
3. In the “Finding and Organising” tab of TVRename, add the same folder that you set utorrent to download your shows to as a search folder.
4. Add your shows to TVRename with settings like this.
5. Create a batch script in the C:Program FilesTVRename directory called “rename.bat” with the following command:
tvrename.exe /renamingcheck /renamingdo /missingcheck /fnocheck /fnodo /quit
From the TVRename forum: "That will make it check for files needing to be renamed, then rename them, then check for missing files, do a finding&organising check for them, move/copy the files found, then quit. Add "/hide" if you want it all to happen without the window coming up"
6. Go into the task scheduler or other scheduling app and add a new task that runs this batch file at intervals to your liking.
Now files that go into your downloads folder will periodically be sorted into your library with appropriate names and in the corresponding season folders (TVRename should create a season folder when necessary), and will only be scanned into XBMC with the correct name.
Want all your downloads, streaming video, and other techie media stuff on your TV? Wondering which media center works best for you? Here’s a look at the biggies in chart and Venn diagram form, followed by some lengthy breakdowns of each.
New to the idea of TV-connected computers? Head down below the charts for some explainers and deeper comparisons of each system. If you’re already familiar with the HTPC scene, we’ll give you the good stuff first.
We focused on three widely available, and generally popular, media centers for our comparison and review. We’re certainly aware there are many alternatives out there, as free software or stand-alone hardware boxes, but these are the three of the most popular media centers, they receive ongoing development, and they can easily be installed on a wide number of TV-connected computers.
Here’s how we see the three major media centers, in chart list and Venn diagram forms. Note: The chart is based on out-of-the-box features that don’t require the user to install any plug-ins.
What does a media center do? It varies, but it generally takes all the stuff you'd normally enjoy on a computer or portable device—MP3s, video files, Netflix, Hulu, digital photos, and web/social apps—and plays it on a television, through your speakers, and back onto your wireless network, if you'd like. Media centers can be run off of pretty much any capable computer, but are generally intended for small and specialized computers, called Home Theater PCs, or HTPCs. HTPCs have the video and audio ports necessary to hook up to a modern high-definition television, and generally have enough processing power and memory to handle the heavy burden of converting, playing, and sometimes recording high-resolution files. If you’ve got a home network set up with shared files and network-attached storage (NAS), media centers can generally pull their content off other systems and devices, as well as receive files for storage and download them directly off the net.
Put simply, a media center allows you to sit on a couch and do the most fun things you'd do on a computer with a remote. You can fire up a movie from Netflix's streaming service or from a file you've already downloaded, catch the show you missed last night on Hulu, put on background music while you're doing something else, share your Flickr or Picasa photos with visiting relatives—whatever you'd like, really.
Not every media center can do everything, however, and some are much better at certain entertainment jobs than others. The editors at Lifehacker conferred on what each box does best, tried to pin down what each system can and can’t do, and put it together in ways that we hope can help you decide.
Here's a more in-depth look at the media centers—installing and setting them up, and their pros and cons.
Windows Media Center is “free” with Home Premium or Ultimate copies of Windows Vista, all versions of Windows 7 except Starter or Home Basic, and available as a stand-alone, XP-based operating system dubbed “Media Center Edition.” XBMC is a free and open-source media center software that was born as a game-changing XBOX modification, but now runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, and XBOX systems, as well as booting and running off a USB stick. Boxee is based on the same core internal code as XBMC, but focuses on bringing web content—video sites, blog streams, and social apps—into your living room, while XBMC remains oriented toward a download-and-play setup.
Plex, a popular and very eye-pleasing media center for Mac OS X, is certainly a contender in this category. For all intents and purposes, though, it’s a variant of XBMC. Most anything we write or display in this post about XBMC applies to Plex, too, except for matters of looks and interface.
Those would be our definitions in the Lifehacker Dictionary, anyways. Let’s get a bit more encyclopedic on the strengths and weaknesses of each system:
Installation and Setup: Fairly easy. It comes pre-loaded in the higher-end editions of Windows Vista and 7, and assuming your computer or HTPC has the right outputs and plugs, Windows can fairly easily adjust its display to your television. If you’re running other Windows systems on your wireless network, you won’t have to do much configuration to start “sharing” files back and forth from the TV-connected system to your other platforms. If you’re running Mac or Linux computers, you’ll have a good deal more work to do. If your media computer came with a TV tuner card already installed, Windows will recognize it and work with it to record TV shows.
Here’s how Adam turned a Windows PC into a Media Center powerhouse, with a good detail on the installation and setup process.
Strengths
Weaknesses
Note: Windows Media Center doesn’t support Hulu by default, but with the right plug-in it can do the trick.
Installation and Setup: It depends, of course, on the platform and hardware you’re installing on. Getting it running and connected on a modern Windows or Mac system is fairly painless, at least from a software standpoint. Running it as a “live” system from a USB stick isn’t too hard, either, and you can install it from there onto an HTPC hard drive. Plugging it into a Madriva Linux box and hooking it up to your very specialized 1080p plasma setup with optical audio out will likely require hair plugs and years of therapy.
Read up on Adam’s guide to building a silent, standalone XBMC media center on the cheap for a look at the live-USB-to-installation path on a $200 HTPC system.
Strengths
Weaknesses:
Installation and Setup: On Windows and Mac systems, the latest Boxee beta is relatively simple to install, as it uses the built-in video and audio systems to push out content. On Linux, it’s a good deal more complex, but, then again, what on Linux isn’t? Apple TVs require a bit of hacking. In general, Boxee is compatible with the same kind of hardware as XBMC—OpenGL or DirectX-compatible video cards are highly recommended.
Here’s how Kevin set up a cheap but powerful Boxee media center using a brawny $350 HTPC and free copies of Linux and Boxee.
Strengths
Weaknesses
Feel free to also tell us which system has worked best for you, and why, in the comments.
Streaming video, digital DVD backups, DVR recording—it's all possible from your TV-connected media center, and you don't need a system administrator to pull it off. These 10 apps make filling and controlling your media center PC even easier.
Photo by William Hook.
Your favorite band, assuming it’s not Motörhead, probably spend a good bit of time thinking about their album art. Pay credit to their creative indulgences, and give your media center something to show when their tracks are playing, by embedding album art in your MP3 collection. Rick Broida ran through the basics in his 2007 guide to whipping your MP3 library into shape, and I revisited the best sources and tools for Windows, Mac, and Linux systems in a 2008 album art guide. Whatever tool you use, having album art consistent across your library might feel a bit obsessive, and it is—but there's a certain reassuring payoff when your TV displays the same art as your iPod.
Some commercials are worth their short time commitment, but sometimes you just want to watch exactly 24 minutes of condensed television. Windows Media Center plug-in Lifextender does the job inside your hooked-up PC, while DVRMSToolbox runs through Media-Center-recorded files independently, and can then export them to more generally usable formats than Windows’ somewhat locked-down system. (Original posts: Lifextender, DVRMSToolbox)
Boxee is basically the XBMC media center app with a different look and a more social flair. It also supports a lot of independent content creators and independent developers, whether through the official App Box, through adding repositories of new apps, or through stand-alone RSS feeds. We’ve covered some great sources for Boxee apps and content in a quick Boxee guide. Looking for even more app repositories? Check out Boxee’s list of known repositories and see what strikes your fancy.
Media player apps try their best to figure out exactly what TV shows and movies you’ve got loaded into storage, but they often have a hard time keeping up with the naming schemes used by a variety of applications and fallible humans. Grab an app like MediaRenamer (for movies and television) or TVrename (for shows alone) and whip your files into a shape that XBMC, Boxee, Windows, Plex, or any other media center can easily figure out. For a quick read on what media center apps like to see—XBMC in particular—read Jason's guide halfway through his XMBC add-on guide.
It’s not an officially supported streaming site, like Netflix or CBS, but Hulu’s own Hulu Desktop can be worked into Windows Media Center with a clever little back-and-forth plug-in. Install Hulu Desktop Integration, and you’ll get an icon for Hulu among your video options. Click it, and Windows Media Center closes down, opens up Hulu Desktop; when you’re done watching Hulu, the app shuts that down and re-opens Media Center. Clever, helpful stuff.
Rather than find out halfway through the final disc of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles that your Netflix disc is scratched beyond repair, you could rip the suspect DVD to a digital file and play it from there, with just a minor skip. Adam’s built a tool called DVD Rip to make it a dead-simple process in Windows, but it’s fairly easy to pull off with HandBrake or VLC Media Player on Windows, Mac, or Linux systems.
With a TV tuner installed, Windows Media Center or Home Server makes for a pretty hardcore DVR device, without the monthly fees. Make it easier to catch good TV when you think of it at work with Web Guide, a free scheduling program that shows you what’s on in the future, streams what’s on now, and otherwise delivers your media center’s TV experience to wherever you happen to be at the moment. (Original post)
Sure, you could go the easy route and buy an infrared-based, media-center-friendly physical remote for your TV-attached setup, but if you'd like a bit more functionality—and, more importantly, actual typing input—there's probably a free or cheap remote for your Wi-Fi powered phone or iPod. Gmote turns an Android phone into a multi-system remote, assuming you don’t mind a quick software installation. iPod/iPhone owners have their pick of many XBMC-compatible remotes in the App Store, the free Boxee remote, and MediaMote (iTunes direct link) ably handles your Windows Media Center remote.
Your standard off-the-shelf router treats all net traffic the same, can’t tell you exactly how much you’ve downloaded this month, and is fairly difficult to turn into anything other than an agent of your cable modem. Install DD-WRT or Tomato on your little antenna box, however, and it can be a wireless bridge for your entertainment center, as well as ensure that Hulu and Netflix get all the bandwidth they need with quality of service rules. (Installation guides: DD-WRT, Tomato)
The best media centers can play just about any video or audio format out there, but even the coolest phones and media devices have a fairly limited format range, and only so much space. Among the five best media converters we rounded up, Super and Format Factory can match most devices and file types, while MediaCoder and HandBrake get the job done on any platform. Need help getting the file onto your phone or device? The doubleTwist media manager is the easiest drag & drop solution we've seen.
You won’t find a better media center than the open-source XBMC, but most people don’t have the space or desire to plug a noisy PC into their TV. Instead, I converted a cheap nettop into a standalone XBMC set-top box. Here’s how.
In the spirit of our Winter Upgrades theme this week, this guide details how to turn a cheapo nettop (think netbook for the desktop) into a killer settop box running XBMC. It handles virtually any video file I throw at it with ease (including streaming Blu-Ray rips from my desktop), it looks tiny next to my Xbox 360, it’s low energy, and it’s whisper quiet.
Huge props to this guide on the XBMC forums, which served as the starting point for much of what I did below.
Getting XBMC Live up and running on your nettop is a breeze if you follow a few simple steps, so let’s get started.
XBMC Live allows you to try XBMC on any computer from a bootable CD or thumb drive, then optionally install the lightweight, XBMC-focused Linux distro directly to your device if you like. Since our nettop doesn’t have a DVD drive, we’ll need to first install XBMC to our thumb drive.
(There are ways around this. If you had a USB optical drive, you could probably burn XBMC Live to a disc and go from there. The thumb drive method isn’t much more difficult, though.)
Here’s how it works:
1. Download the XBMC Live installer with the updated NVIDIA drivers included on this page (direct link, torrent link). Update: Huge thanks to Mike and Aaron for the file hosting and torrent creating. It’s a 341MB file, so it may take a while.
2. Burn XBMC Live to a CD
Once the download completes, unzip the xbmc.zip file. What you're left with is an xbmc.iso file—the disc image of the XBMC Live installer. Now you need to burn this ISO to a CD. Install our favorite tool for the job, ImgBurn, then right-click the xbmc.iso file and select Burn using ImgBurn. (If you’re running Windows 7, you can use its built-in ISO burner, too, by selecting Burn disc image.)
3. Install XBMC Live to Your Thumb Drive
Now that you’ve burned XBMC to a CD, you’re ready to install it to your thumb drive. To do so, plug in your thumb drive, put the XBMC Live CD in your DVD drive, and reboot your computer. If it’s not already your default setting, go into your system BIOS (for most computers hitting Delete at the first boot screen will launch your BIOS) and set your optical drive as the primary boot device.
(All this means is that when your computer boots, it'll first check to see if there's any bootable media in your optical drive. If not, it'll continue booting to your secondary device—generally your hard drive. If your optical drive does contain bootable media—like your XBMC Live CD, for example—it'll boot it up.)
When XBMC Live loads, select “Install XBMCLive to disk (USB or HDD)”, then accept the first prompt (by pressing any key). Next you’ll end up at the “Choose disk to use” prompt, where you’ll tell the installer that you want to install to your USB stick. Be careful here not to choose your hard drive, because it would be happy to overwrite your operating system if you told it to. Remember, your thumb drive is the Removable disk. After you pick the disk you want to use, confirm that you want to proceed and let the installer do its magic. (It’ll only take a few minutes.)
Eventually the installer will ask you if you want to create a permanent system storage file, which presumably you’d want if you’re not sure whether or not you want to install XBMC Live to your Acer’s hard drive. I went ahead and created the system storage (even though we’ll install XBMC Live directly to the hard drive in the next step.) Once the installation finishes, you’re ready to proceed to the next step.
You’ll need to make a couple of tweaks to your system BIOS to get it working smoothly with XBMC Live. So plug in your thumb drive, boot up your Acer AspireRevo, and hit Delete at the first boot screen to edit your BIOS. Look for the “Boot to RevoBoot” entry in the Advanced BIOS features menu and disable it. While you’re there, set your XBMC Live thumb drive as the primary boot device. (You can set the primary boot device back to your hard drive later, after you’ve installed XBMC Live to your drive.)
Then go to the Advanced Chipset Features menu and set the iGPU Frame Buffer Detect to Manual and set the iGPU Frame Buffer Size to 256MB. (This is detailed here; the actual guide says 512, but that requires that you install more RAM—something I may do in the future, and will detail with a guide if I do. The 512 buffer size will help you stream the larger HD videos without hiccups.)
Now that your BIOS are set, you’re ready to try out XBMC Live on your Acer AspireRevo.
At this point, you’ve got two choices. You can either restart your Acer AspireRevo and boot into XBMC Live to play around a little before you install it to your disk. If you’re sure you’re ready to install it for reals, just go ahead and run through the exact same installation as you did above, only this time install it to your nettop’s hard drive. When you install to the hard drive, you’ll also set a system password. This’ll come in handy later.
Okay, so far so good. XBMC should boot up directly from your hard drive now, and if you’ve plugged in your Windows Media Center remote, it should also be working without a hitch. You’ve just got to make a couple of adjustments to make it shine.
Now, what makes your little nettop work so well is that its onboard graphics processor can handle all the HD business without eating up your regular processor power, so you'll want to enable this in the XBMC settings. So head to Settings > Video > Play, find the Set Render to section, and set it to VDPAU.
Now, depending on how you’re planning on hooking up your XBMC Live box to your television, you’ve got a few more tweaks you’ll want to make. Namely this:
If you want to use HDMI for your audio out, head to Settings > System > Audio hardware, then set the audio output to Digital. Set your Audio output device to hdmi, and set the Passthrough output device to hdmi. Last, enable Downmix multichannel audio to stereo.
If you are using HDMI as your audio out (I am, and it’s pretty nice), you’ve got to make one final tweak if you want the audio output to work with menu sounds. (It’ll work fine with video without making this tweak, but the click-click sounds that play when you move around the XBMC menu are nice to have.) If that applies to you, create a new text file on your regular old computer (name it asoundrc.txt) and paste the following code (again, this awesome tweak comes from this post):
pcm.!default { type plug slave { pcm "hdmi" } }
In the next step, I’ll show you how to copy that file over to your nettop (a little trick that’ll also come in handy for manually installing plug-ins and copying files to your nettop).
If you want to transfer files to your XBMC Live box from another computer, you’ll need to get yourself an FTP client (I like FileZilla) and log into your nettop with the password you set when you were installing XBMC Live. To do so, create a new connection in Filezilla that looks something like the screenshot below (the default user is xbmc).
Once you’re connected, make sure you’re in the /home/xbmc/ directory, then copy over the asoundrc.txt file we made above. (The one you want to use if you’re running your audio through the HDMI output.) Once it’s copied over, rename the file to .asoundrc, restart XBMC, and the click-click menu sounds should be working along with regular old A/V playback.
The same SFTPing method here will be useful if you ever want to manually install any plug-ins or skins down the road, or just copy over media directly to your nettop's hard drive. (Though we'd recommend streaming—see below.)
As I said above, you can buy more expensive, meatier machines, but for my money this Acer nettop has worked perfectly. Apart from upgrading to better equipment, you can also add up to 2GB more RAM if you’re up for the job (RAM’s so cheap these days, anyway). Like I said, though, so far I haven’t seen the need for it.
I also quickly switched the skin to the MediaStream skin, which is the one you see in the photo at the top of the page. For a look at some other great skins you may want to apply to your XBMC box, check out these five beautiful skins—or just head to XBMC's main skins page.
Now that you’ve got it all set up, you’ve probably also realized that 160GB isn’t all that much space for your media. You’d be right, of course. You’ve got two pretty good options. First, the nettop should have something like four free USB ports still, so you can easily plug in a big old drive that way. Assuming, however, that you can run an Ethernet wire over to your nettop, your best option is just to connect it to a shared folder on your home network. XBMC works like a charm with Samba shares (Windows shared folders use this).
Whichever method you use, you just need to add your extra hard drive space as a source in XBMC. You can do so through any of the individual menu items (videos, for example), or you can add a default Samba username and password in the settings so it can connect automatically without asking for a password each time you add a new watch folder on that machine.
At this point I could go into more detail on how to use and get the most out of XBMC (it can be a little hard to get your head around at first, even though once you do, it’s not actually confusing). We’ve covered souping up your XBMC—and building your classic Xbox XBMC machine—and both offer some help in those directions. But stick around; tomorrow we'll follow up with an updated guide to some of our favorite XBMC tweaks.
This guide covers in pretty close detail one method for putting together a dedicated, quiet XBMC media center without breaking the bank, but it’s certainly not your only option. If you’ve gone down this road before, offer your tips and suggestions in the comments. For my part: I’m completely in love with my new little media center.
Adam Pash is the editor of Lifehacker and loves a good computer-based DIY, especially when the results are as beautiful as XBMC. His special feature Hack Attack appears on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Hack Attack RSS feed to get new installments in your newsreader, or follow @adampash on Twitter.
Almost any platform you could want: XBMC has updated to version 9.04, codename Babylon, available now for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Apple TV, the classic Xbox, and bootable CDs or USB drives.
This update finalizes features that were part of the 9.04 beta, including:
PPC (PowerPC) support for Mac OS X, VDPAU (NVIDIA GPU Hardware Accelerated Video Decoding for Linux), updated Codecs, new Karaoke features, more Media Info Scrapers, improved FanArt support, and of course enhancements to the XBMC Skinning Framework making it even more flexible and powerful.
Hit up the 9.04 changelog for a full look at the changes, or just head to the download page to grab the latest for your favored platform. XBMC is a free download, works almost anywhere you could want it.
Windows/Mac/Linux/Xbox: What could make the already awesome Xbox Media Center even better? An infusion of eye candy, of course. Read on to see some awesome XBMC skins and learn how to install them.
What is this media center magic we speak of? Originally an open-source package designed to run on modified Microsoft Xboxes and turn them into full-fledged media centers, XBMC gained such a popular following that it has been ported to Windows, Mac, and Linux. If you’re new to XBMC, you’re in luck. Lifehacker has much love for XBMC, and we’ve written guides to help you install it on a classic Xbox, install it on your Mac, run it from a thumb drive, and covered the first completely cross-platform release XBMC Atlantis.
Once you’ve grabbed a copy of XBMC and installed it, the customization can begin. The default skin on just about every distribution of XBMC is Project Mayhem III and its HD variant, the original skin is show at right. It’s a beautiful skin and if no one could customize it away, very few people would complain. You’re not here to keep things stock though, so admire Project Mayhem for being so awesome it was made the default skin and prepare to customize!
Installing skins is about as straightforward as customizing software can be. Depending on which operating system you’re using XBMC on, you’ll need to extract the contents of the archive you’ve downloaded into one of the following directories:
- Windows:
C:Program FilesXBMCskin- Mac:
~/Library/Application Support/XBMC/skin- Linux:
~/.xbmc/skin/
You’ll most likely never come across a skin that doesn’t have the directory structure already carefully mapped out, all of the skins below can simply be extracted into the skin folder and all the necessary components will be neatly placed in skinSomeFancySkin automatically.
Once you’ve extracted the skins, switching from the default is as easy as navigating in the XBMC menu to System -> Appearance, and selecting your new skin.
Different installation packages and releases for different operating systems have different skins included. Some of the following skins may be bundled with the installation you downloaded, MediaStream comes with XBMC Atlantis for example. Check your /skins/ directory before downloading, you may luck out and already have the skin. Note: Each of the following skins was downloaded and tested on both a classic Xbox and HTPC running Windows XP with a 1080p display, with stunning results. The screenshots below—except some for the Focus skin—are from the respective websites of each design team, their media collections were far more varied and interesting than this humble tester's.
Aeon was built from the ground up to look stunning in HD. Although you can display Aeon on a SD display, the skin was designed to be native to 1080p. XBMC will scale everything down accordingly, but be forewarned that if you're using the original Xbox as your XBMC platform, using the rich 1080P background images you see in the screenshots above will cause stuttering—the same is true of any of the skins here that use HD background images. The eye candy factor on Aeon isn't from the over abundance of items and menus on the screen but on how seamlessly and almost transparently they interact with each other. The skin functions more as a frame to show off your media collection than anything else. The default background for each main menus is an abstract Mac-esque swish of color. The awesome images seen in the screenshots above were pulled from the hundreds of HD background images available on the Aeon website.
MediaStream has menus with a weightier appearance than Aeon, but the skin still maintains a minimalist approach. Menu text is solid and bold, the menus slide out in a blade-style system that is snappy, and navigation is easy. Since version 0.90 there has been support for SD 4:3 viewing ratio, so if you haven’t made the leap to a HD TV yet you can use MediaStream without any scaling. Like Aeon you can set customs backgrounds and use fan art. If you’re having trouble keeping up on which of your shows you’ve watched, take advantage of the unwatched media menu to get a fresh list of all the things you haven’t watched yet.
Focus is by far the most minimal skin in our roundup. It isn’t overly flashy but the transitions between menus are smooth and pleasant. The menus themselves are well laid out with frequently accessed items like unwatched television shows placed near the top. None of the skins we tested felt unwieldy or intrusive by any measure, but Focus was especially quick to melt into the background and make you forget there was even anything there between you and your pile of media.
MC360 is the most complete clone of the XboX 360 dashboard available for XBMC. The animations are spot on and you can even use your real Xbox Live Gamercard info for your profile. The game save manager is very polished, something that isn't a high priority for some of the other skins in the roundup. MC360 has native support for all SD and HD resolutions up to 1080i—the highest resolution the classic Xbox can display with the component video pack. The skin has three themes: the default 360 skin, the high transparency Glass skin, and Carbon a smokier version of the default. If you're using an Xbox with a supported modchip, MC360 can change the color of the LED on the chip.
If the purists among you are shocked and scandalized by all of these non-traditional skins, especially that nonsense about putting the Xbox 360 skin on a classic Xbox, don't worry. The same team behind the beautifully executed 360 skin has a classic Xbox skin that is just as accurate and stunning in its own right. The interface of the original Xbox wasn't a marvel of flashy transparency but it was a very well implemented—and green!—design. The Classix Xbox skin pays hommage to that design and remains very faithful to the original interface. Love the design but not sold on the bright green? There are themes included to turn the skin fiery red and deep blue.
The screenshots here can’t even begin to do justice to the stunning work these design teams have done. Most of the skins are fairly small, 50-100MB in size, it’s more than worth it to download them all and see which one looks the best on your setup. Between the hard work of the XBMC design team and the teams behind these skins, the experience is so seamless and enjoyable you’ll be amazed you didn’t pay hundreds of dollars for the pleasure.
Love a skin that isn’t featured here? Have a cool hack for XBMC you’re dying to share? Sound off in the comments below and help your fellow readers get more out of their media centers.
Jason Fitzpatrick is the Weekend Editor at Lifehacker and a devotee of the pure awesome that is XBMC. He can frequently be found in his workshop modifying Xboxes to give to friends and spread the gospel of open source.