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customers can upgrade to a version compatible with LG's now 'dumb' televisions. this new firmware stores and receives digital media, imports users music, can be viewed in multiple rooms, and wont cripple your cat if you dont forward a list of your favourite shows to them.

If you go with XBMC may I recommend setting Dirty Regions to 1 instead of the default of 3? It gives XBMC a nice speed boost and drops its CPU-usage a whole bunch. See http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php... for details.

XBMC's Gotham release already runs on this device and XDA members are sideloading apps already. It's early days for the FireTV, but it looks promising.

http://forum.xda-developers.co...

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthre...

I don't understand how you can refer to Netflix in the same breath as "light or zero DRM." Has anyone yet made a second Netflix client? Maybe I'm not as plugged into the underground as I used to, because I haven't heard anyone say they have managed to play Netflix streams yet. If I'm wrong, then it's time to bring on the XBMC and MythTV plugins.

I found one hack that tries to bring Netflix into the fold, but that actually uses Netflix's own software (running within Chrome!).

As far as I can tell, Netflix still uses extremely heavy DRM, so heavy that currently, only 31337 d00ds crack it (probably to pirate) (and I bet they don't even do that, and are instead capping the output), and regular uses still can't use their own clients.

If anyone other than Netflix ever implements Netflix's protocol (and it gets disclosed in public), you're going to hear words like "lawyers" and "ton of bricks" used repeatedly. There's nothing even slightly "light or none" about Netflix DRM, or how DMCA would apply to it.

We're talking about Steam boxes, which run SteamOS, which is Debian based and therefore can run XBMC.

There is a launcher from XBMC that will open Steam in Big Picture Mode.

And for the do-it-yourselfer:

XBMC

Ofc it is, it even has Chrome pre installed. The Linux version that is.

http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Installing_XBMC_for_Linux

Uhhh...you DO know that you don't HAVE to stick with the default shell,yes? And that nearly every emulator out there ALREADY has a version built specifically for XBMC which solves pretty much EVERY problem you have brought up, yes? And that its free in both senses of the word?

Seriously give it a try as I have set up several XBMC based HTPCs for customers and they love it. 10 foot UI with multiple choices of UI and layout, emulators already designed to plug into XBMC, it pretty much solves every problem you seem to have with replacing a console with a (frankly superior on performance and media prices) PC short of plugging in the HDMI cable for you.

XBMC to the rescue: http://xbmc.org/

It runs on a number of small form factor devices that run from $100 - $300 (zotac, acer revo, appletv, etc.)

As XBMC is already behind the Ouya we should expect good things http://xbmc.org/natethomas/2012/08/07/xbmc-and-ouya-oh-yeah/

XBMC on the RasPi is excellent if a little laggy on menus (playback, even at 1080p, is fine). If the Ouya can be as good with better hardware and more focus on sound processing (which the Raspi is not so good at) we should have a winner.

Sure, you can spend more money to get something that is better but then you have the energy, noise and thermal footprint to consider. A lot of us just want a LAN connected media centre with a really decent front-end. That front-end is currently XBMC. If you want to play games, do that on a 360/iDevice/Android device.

It's not Netflix or Lovefilm, but Hulu works great under XBMC w/ Linux using the Bluecop addon. http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=121023

I know the response is that this shouldn't be necessary, but I find using bluecop's XBMC amazon plugin the best way to watch amazon prime shows and movies. I prefer it to the official ps3 client since the xbmc plugin sorts prime content from non-prime content (even better - it allows you to hide non-prime content.)

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=108124

Have you tried setting the dirty regions option? For whatever reason the default re-renders the entire screen 60 times per second... but you can flip it to only updating when regions are damaged. Once I flipped that on I was able to use xbmc alright on my ancient athlon.

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=146711

NES, SNES, MAME, and others. I'll admit Wayland and SDL are interesting but my hardware already runs XBMC fine using VDPAU and I'm more excited about getting the ability to run games vs a different display technology...

What is XBMC? What is SDL? What is Wayland?

FFS TFS needs some TLC.

XBMC is a "software media player and entertainment hub for digital media".

SDL is Simple DirectMedia Layer and "is a cross-platform multimedia library designed to provide low level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, 3D hardware via OpenGL, and 2D video framebuffer".

"Wayland is a computer display server protocol and a library for Linux implementing that protocol."

XBMC = XBox Media Center - http://xbmc.org/ SDL = Simple DirectMedia Layer - http://www.libsdl.org/ Wayland = http://wayland.freedesktop.org/

Yeah, so to actually address the guy's question, I think most Android music apps are pretty crappy. There I said it.

I think he was hoping to get some recommendation along the lines of "just install rockbox" ( http://www.rockbox.org/ ) or the Android edition of XBMC ( http://xbmc.org/download/ ) ".

My experiences with those:
Rockbox: buy a cheapo Sansa media player. Futz around with the neat but futzy interface. Finally the thin gets bricked after a month of use (not firmware updates or even updating the media library, just occasional use). That was a few years ago, so "it's probably better now"

XBMC : haven't played with it on Android yet, maybe soon. I wasn't impressed with it on the PC, but probably because I'm not a big fan of TV-style menu interfaces.

After playing briefly with the other Android media players (Apollo, Google Play, TwistedPlayer), I ended up shelling out money for Winamp Pro. The lyrics plugin mostly works (a lot of my music is too obscure, I guess?), the album art lookup plugin works, it has nice desktop control widgets, and I found the interface a bit less confusing to navigate. Also it supports internet streaming radio, which is good because I mostly can't be bothered to spend time maintaining my own playlist.

But nowadays I mostly stream internet radio using the SomaFM app (another paid app :/ ), because it's even simpler and more stable at keeping a stream playing than Winamp.

I figure the less time I spend getting background music up and playing, the more time I have for doing stuff I actually enjoy. My personal library of music just needs to be searchable enough for when I want to bring up something specific.

I still feel a bit of sore, so I'll chip in the discussion.
Few months ago I read several good reviews about the Zboxes as HTPC, so I bought one, together with 4Gb of RAM and a 160Gb SSD. The GPU was a ION and no, there were no chances to have a decent XBMC experience nor playing 720i videos (1080p? don't even think about it) without having very unpleasant "hiccups" here and there in the playback. Forget about any online streaming with more than 360p resolution (average YouTube videos were enough to put the thing on its knees). No, desktop effects were not on the way (i.e. barebone XFCE). It shouldn't have been a surprise, since it was sporting a crappy Atom D525 processor 1.8GHz, and I blame myself for having bought the positive reviews despite the terrible hardware specs.
After two frustrating weeks of tweaking trying to squeeze more juice out of it (Xorg.conf, VDPAU, Nvidia drivers...), I've sent it back and with pretty much the same amount of money, I've tried one of the cheap solutions I've found on the XBCM forum.
I got a i3@3.1GHz machine that's able to run smoothly Black Mesa, SteelStorm and TF2.
The box slashvertized here has a Celeron 847 instead of the Atom, but CPU performances are equally poor, so don't even think about games (or at least nothing more complex than Gchess).

The rather trivial moral of the story is that if you want a powerful machine you should buy one, and not waste your time with toy computers.
Be wise with your money and never look back.

Sort of working version http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=147741

The remote part works for me, most of the times. It's rough though

It's a limitation of the add-on that you're using. Multiple add-ons support these features, and you can find all the information on our wiki: http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=PVR And as the dev who merged PVR support in and maintained the PVR support in XBMC for the last 3-4 years: no it was not shoehorned in. You just failed to read the documentation that is available and/or you're using a backend or add-on that doesn't support these things.

RTFM

XBMC supports multiple user profiles, much the same as setting up individual users on your home computer. These individual profiles allow you to customize the environment for multiple users, allowing for such functionality as:

• Customized view settings such as skins for each user
• The ability to lock folders, such as network shares on a per-user basis
• Separate Media Libraries for each user

Did you even attempt to find something yourself?

LOL Noobs

...from a NAS device. Like you, I've spent HOURS getting all the TV cataloged, named correctly, and with images. Like you, I have kids I don't want watching certain things and I solve it thusly:

1:Create a share on your NAS which has the items you DON'T want them to watch and make it so that it needs a password or whatever credentials you need to connect to it.

2:Add the share to XBMC, but put it under a Master Profile.

3: Create another Profile for your younglings that can't access the shared files. Double bonus, since you password protected the share, if they do go scanning the network, they'll have to have to know the (hopefully) different password to mount the share with your non-kid content.

4:??? Profit?

Check this out: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=108232 I think it will help you sort your media out with haste.

RTFM

XBMC supports multiple user profiles, much the same as setting up individual users on your home computer. These individual profiles allow you to customize the environment for multiple users, allowing for such functionality as:

• Customized view settings such as skins for each user
• The ability to lock folders, such as network shares on a per-user basis
• Separate Media Libraries for each user

Did you even attempt to find something yourself?

And now with linkage!

Last I heard, the Ouya project is already working along with XBMC (who has an Android app).

http://xbmc.org/natethomas/2012/08/07/xbmc-and-ouya-oh-yeah/

There is XBMC support with hardware decoding for Allwinner, its been around for a month or so. Check the tail end of this forum http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=126995. This is the github with the source https://github.com/empatzero/xbmca10. Here are some build instructions http://linux-sunxi.org/XBMC. And there is this project that plans to put everything like this into a distribution for Allwinner devices http://www.indiegogo.com/pengpod.

I use my Nook Color running CyanogenMod as an XBMC remote. Also my wife's & my current droid have the app on them. So when we crash on the couch to watch some shows or movies you cant beat the setup.

If you are one of those people who want to control their media, not the other way around.. then this is a great use for an old droid w/ wifi capabilities.

See if you can mod your device.

NAVI-X should be added to XMBC

I have two questions for the XBMC Android folks:

1. Where can I donate? XBMC rocks and I'm long overdue :)

2. Where can I get fresh builds of the Android port? I can't wait to fire it up on my Google TV!

Google broke?

http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Developing_XBMC_for_Android

https://github.com/xbmc/android

http://xbmc.org/theuni/2012/07/13/xbmc-for-android/

I have two questions for the XBMC Android folks:

1. Where can I donate? XBMC rocks and I'm long overdue :)

2. Where can I get fresh builds of the Android port? I can't wait to fire it up on my Google TV!

Google broke?

http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Developing_XBMC_for_Android

https://github.com/xbmc/android

http://xbmc.org/theuni/2012/07/13/xbmc-for-android/

1. Where can I donate? XBMC rocks and I'm long overdue :)

Here.

2. Where can I get fresh builds of the Android port? I can't wait to fire it up on my Google TV!

According to their wiki some porting of libraries may still need to be done but you can clone into their github source for android and try to build it for your device (use their wiki to get started). I think all their development has been done for Pivos which now is an official sponsor of XBMC.

1. Where can I donate? XBMC rocks and I'm long overdue :)

Here.

2. Where can I get fresh builds of the Android port? I can't wait to fire it up on my Google TV!

According to their wiki some porting of libraries may still need to be done but you can clone into their github source for android and try to build it for your device (use their wiki to get started). I think all their development has been done for Pivos which now is an official sponsor of XBMC.

You can donate here : http://xbmc.org/contribute/donate/ Hope that helps!

15 years ago I hooked my computer up to a 25" TV when Comedy Central wasn't on the local cable lineup and I wanted to watch South Park on a TV. That used a VGA-TV converter. The audio line out went to a stereo. South Park compresses pretty well and played fine full screen on Real Player. Today you can go straight VGA, DVI or HDMI. You can buy a remote for a computer for less than $10 and with XBMC you can use a smartphone or tablet as a remote.

People picture a computer sitting next to the TV but mine sits inside the entertainment system and it's not even seen. If you don't want to mess with a computer at all and you just want to try out streaming on your TV you could always get a Roku. Even when I watch an SD stream I think it looks better than SD on cable. I think cable makes SD look worse than it really is.

15 years ago I hooked my computer up to a 25" TV when Comedy Central wasn't on the local cable lineup and I wanted to watch South Park on a TV. That used a VGA-TV converter. The audio line out went to a stereo. South Park compresses pretty well and played fine full screen on Real Player. Today you can go straight VGA, DVI or HDMI. You can buy a remote for a computer for less than $10 and with XBMC you can use a smartphone or tablet as a remote.

People picture a computer sitting next to the TV but mine sits inside the entertainment system and it's not even seen. If you don't want to mess with a computer at all and you just want to try out streaming on your TV you could always get a Roku. Even when I watch an SD stream I think it looks better than SD on cable. I think cable makes SD look worse than it really is.

XBMC + Fusion That oughta save you a wee bit more and give you far more options than you really need. You might also want to find a nice VPN service in the appropriate places. Then OTA if you need local news stations and lighter fare, and are in an area that gives you the capablity to recieve OTA transmissions. All of these things can be piped thru your pc to your big screen HDTV, you might even be able to build youself a sweet little HTPC setup with a few extra screens for IRC and other multi tasking things as well. :) Don't limit yourself.

See http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Allwinner_A10

I have to think that while something like Plex would be better for a lot of people, XBMC still gets used on name recognition alone. If you have more than one device that you watch media on (TVs, Roku, tablets, phones, whatever) why wouldn't you want a central server managing the library, downloading metadata, saving watched flags, holding resume times, and serving up video to the devices? I turned a friend on to Plex from XBMC and he's amazed at how often he stops watching in one room and resumes in another. I love it too. I can't count the times that I've started watching something on the iPad in the kitchen while cleaning up and then going into the bedroom to finish on the TV. That's a way bigger feature to me than getting "the real deal" running everywhere I need it.

The people above wanting this for Google TV...check out Plex, it may be exactly what you're looking for.

Sorry to not gush for XBMC, I know it's the best solution for many people and I truly appreciate the heritage and the fact that it's the foundation for Plex, but until they have a centralized server (if ever), I can't even consider it for myself. And no I'm not going to jump through hoops to get it.

Plex transcodes and the resulting video looks pretty terrible. XBMC plays video natively.

I have to think that while something like Plex would be better for a lot of people, XBMC still gets used on name recognition alone. If you have more than one device that you watch media on (TVs, Roku, tablets, phones, whatever) why wouldn't you want a central server managing the library, downloading metadata, saving watched flags, holding resume times, and serving up video to the devices? I turned a friend on to Plex from XBMC and he's amazed at how often he stops watching in one room and resumes in another. I love it too. I can't count the times that I've started watching something on the iPad in the kitchen while cleaning up and then going into the bedroom to finish on the TV. That's a way bigger feature to me than getting "the real deal" running everywhere I need it.

The people above wanting this for Google TV...check out Plex, it may be exactly what you're looking for.

Sorry to not gush for XBMC, I know it's the best solution for many people and I truly appreciate the heritage and the fact that it's the foundation for Plex, but until they have a centralized server (if ever), I can't even consider it for myself. And no I'm not going to jump through hoops to get it.

You could always just donate to the project.

http://xbmc.org/contribute/donate/

XBMC is an award-winning free and open source (GPL) software media player and entertainment hub for digital media.

Does this mean we can publicly criticize the XBMC UI?

Uhhh... Of course. By that same token, there's nothing holding you back from making a better one.

http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=HOW-TO:Install_XBMC_for_Windows

and its UBUNTU counter part...

http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=HOW-TO:Install_XBMC_on_Ubuntu

or LINUX in general

http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=HOW-TO:Install_XBMC_for_Linux

for the average user, point and click is a much easier solution.

http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=HOW-TO:Install_XBMC_for_Windows

and its UBUNTU counter part...

http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=HOW-TO:Install_XBMC_on_Ubuntu

or LINUX in general

http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=HOW-TO:Install_XBMC_for_Linux

for the average user, point and click is a much easier solution.

http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=HOW-TO:Install_XBMC_for_Windows

and its UBUNTU counter part...

http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=HOW-TO:Install_XBMC_on_Ubuntu

or LINUX in general

http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=HOW-TO:Install_XBMC_for_Linux

for the average user, point and click is a much easier solution.

Yessir thats the way to go! XBMC for the win! At least as long as you have unlimited cable or a very high cap heh. Especially since Boxee Box no longer supports pc's. :( Then theres PLEX and a few other variants out there, I'd stick to XBMC if I were you; plenty of plugin's and aggreators and repositories out there for XBMC you'll never be sorry.

Plenty of plugin's out there for XBMC of which Navi-X is one, and there are others over at XBMC HUB so do check 'em out. I love XBMC its the best thing available anywheres right now.

I found this thread, but I don't know anything about its quality.

Yes, but a little light on features. The locks are on folders, not content ratings.

http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Profiles

Small form factor media PC running XBMC will do everything you want and more.

The Debian packages are really strange for XBMC. First off the Linux instructions are aimed primarily at Ubuntu. Then the other problem is that there is some kind of a fork between the "official packages" for Ubuntu and the Debian packages provided on debian-multimedia.org, the latter not being up to date (only rc2 is available).

...

Short of adding a Ubuntu PPA to my sources.list, I am not sure how I can get this thing installed on Debian, which is a bit annoying.

I've compiled it myself for Debian, using the instructions from Compile XBMC for Linux. I've spent some hours figuring out which packages to install prior to compilation, but most of them is listed in the README.linux file (which you get when you checkout with git as part of the installation procedure).

When you're done compiling, instead of doing a make install, use checkinstall to get a .deb package.

The best thing about this is that you can run the latest code without waiting for a release. The code in the repository have always been very stable for me, and I've had access to most of the features in 11.0 since February. Once you've managed to do your own compile it's just a matter of git pull to get the latest changes downloaded and then doing a recompile and build a new package.