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Linux Finally Getting XBMC
B47h0ry'5 CuR53 writes "XBMC is getting ported to Linux. A few developers of Team-XBMC have begun the porting of XBMC to Linux using OpenGL and the SDL toolkit. In this effort, they are recruiting developers. XBMC is, by far, one of the finest projects to come out of the open source community; and to think it is homebrew. XBMC is a massive project, with the current SVN branch weighing about 350M before compilation. Porting it will be a big effort and any hackers willing to contribute should check out the Linux port project."
For reference, for the 99% of us out here who have no frickin' clue what something like XBMC might stand for, it would be nice to spell out the whole abbreviation at least once in summaries. Since it wasn't mentioned, XBMC is the Xbox Media Center, an open source media center project to play images and videos of various formats and from various sources, such as streaming from your PC or even the Internet, on your Xbox 360. It will let you use your Xbox 360 kind of like a beefed-up and free Apple TV
Sounds pretty cool, but it does require that you mod your Xbox 360, and Microsoft has been banning modded Xboxes from their Xbox Live service. I'm not saying do it or don't do it, just that before you get too excited and start downloading stuff, you ought to know that as part of your decision.
Because, you know, allowing people to improve your product for free by adding a ton of useful functionality, customizing the thing they've laid out a not-insignificant amount of hard-earned cash for to better suit their needs must be stopped at all costs. After all, it might cost you a few bucks in not selling movies that people already own to them again.
Depends on the media format. My 350MHz P3 had a problem with some DivXs. A P2 will be able to play DVD rips and some other videos, and will have no trouble at all with audio.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBMC "Xbox Media Center (XBMC) is an award-winning media player for the original Xbox game-console. XBMC can play music, play videos and display images from the Xbox's DVD drive, its internal hard-drive drive, a local network, USB flash drive, and the internet. It also functions as a replacement dashboard to launch Xbox games off the hard-disk drive. Other functions of XBMC include large metadata databases for music/video-file handling, displaying weather forecasts and TV guides, watching YouTube videos and apple.com movie trailers, listening to SHOUTcast and Podcasts streaming internet radio/video, also XBMC functions as a gaming platform by allowing users to play python-based mini-games and a free online-gaming alternative to Xbox Live. It is important to note that the software requires a modchip, softmod exploit or other means by which to execute on the Xbox as it is a homebrew application. XBMC is free and open source software, the source code is distributed under the GNU General Public License. The XBMC project is not produced or endorsed by Microsoft."
;)
The article then goes on into more feature/function details, it is recommended reading
Xbox Media Center is one of the best kept secrets in the programming world. After all, it only runs on the original Xbox, and while there is a healthy modding community that has been hacking them since release, it isn't exactly mainstream. It's been a crying shame that this exceptional media program has been tied to the original Xbox for so long, and I'm thrilled that it's being ported over to Linux and set free for everyone to use.
The killer feature of this program is *not* what it does. It's a very powerful and robust media player, certainly, but the true power comes from the user interface, which is simple, effective, straightforward and very pretty to look at (and fully skinnable). Anyone who has used a TiVo or similar television media interface should have no problems using XBMC. Now that it is no longer tied to the Xbox, it will be possible to create small form factor media center systems running linux and give them a truly excellent user interface.
The interface supports running external programs (in particular, games and game emulators), python scripting to handle writing widgets to interface with popular media sites like YouTube, file management, and streaming from nearly any source. It also works as an FTP/Samba/HTTP server to serve out whatever media is stored on the disk to other sources. There is a web interface for remote management. It'll work with USB joysticks and remote control as well as keyboards. There is a web browser but it's a bit hinky - I'm sure that someone will merge it with Firefox after it is ported.
If you're wondering why anyone would give a damn about the original Xbox or this program, the upshot is this... for $129 you could buy a P3 system (xbox), hack it with software exploits (fairly easily), install a hard disk up to 1TB in side to replace the original, and have a portable media player box that could hold hundreds of hours of content and play it back in 480p/720p/1080i and DTS. The price to do that with any computer was far higher at the time (and frankly still is, especially in setup time). I've been carting mine around for years and have had a great many friends request that I make one for them. I think I've done around thirty of them by now.
I think Microsoft/Sony completely missed the boat by overlooking this application for their gaming consoles. Either they just didn't see it or they don't like this behavior and see it as a liability of some kind. Either way, we won't be needing them much longer. A clever company could probably turn this into a killer set-top app with some business savvy. All it needs is a bit-torrent backend for sharing content with other users and connectivity to media sites, and you've got a TV channel killer on your hands and a new distribution network (if it ever gets big).
Hell is being intelligent in a world full of idiots.
yes you are (confused) Yes, we use mplayer on Xbox1, as one of _several_ CORES for playback. it's not the stock mplayer but a modified version. XBMC is the gui and all added functions, too many for me to list. You need to have used xbmc to understand what it's about /pike, XBMC Projectmanager
XBMC for Linux (once mature enough for eveyone to use) will require that end-users (not developers) have a 3D GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) that at least supports Shader Model 3.0 and OpenGL 2.0 (and featuring 24bpp or 32bpp for 3D hardware-acceleration support, (such retail adapter usually state on the box that they support "DirectX version 9.0c"). The XBMC GUI needs this to run smootly at an acceptable frame-rate). Meaning a NVIDIA GeForce 6150 (or later), alternativly a Intel GMA X3000/G965 (or later) graphics-controller-chip/chipset, (ATI has so bad Linux drivers so not worth mentioning).
the xbox runs a stripped down version of Windows 2000. The executable files are called .xbe instead of .exe. it evens uses a variation of Direct X for the games. do some research the next time you are confused.
While I agree that this is good practice, and should be followed, Slashdot is theoretically News for Nerds. If you're a nerd, you should either a) already know what XBMC is, b) be able to figure it out without help, or c) both. Those of us who fall into the latter category spend a significant portion of our time on slashdot either laughing or rolling our eyes at those of you who fall into none of these groups.
What kind of nerd can't do some fucking research? Especially when, as was pointed out just above you, if you hover over the first link all is explained. Not to mention that this site is a link aggregator with a discussion system, it's about links, if you're confused, follow the link. I know that this is slashdot, and we don't do that here, but it really does have the potential to shed a certain amount of light on the subject.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Different projects with different goals - however, that said, in spirit they are very similar. The television based user interfaces share a lot of the same ideas. I'd rate XBMC as a more user friendly product but Myth is closeer to it than any other working app I've seen. Myth and XBMC would make a good pairing - one for managing, watching, and recording your television shows, the other for connecting you to any other media on any network or server. MythTV would make a good addition to XBMC's front menu with a label of "Television". XBMC does have plugins to communicate with Myth, but they are a bit primitive at this stage. Rolling them together would be a fine project for Ubuntu Studio or some other media center distribution like LinuxMCE or Pluto@Home.
I'll second the previous poster's comment of "not even close." I know nothing that can replace this app once you've come to use it for a while. There are no comparable programs out there of similar quality - the closest to it I mentioned above but they are not nearly as good.
This is absolutely as much of a killer app for TV-based computers as Apache was for commodity web servers. Far too many people are assuming this is just another media player. It's not. It's a frontend for anything you could possibly want to do on a television set with a computer, and the best one going. Pictures do not do it justice, no more than a picture of an Ubuntu desktop tells you what happens when you start digging into the menus and programs. Try it before you knock it.
Hell is being intelligent in a world full of idiots.
WAF or GFAF. (Wife Acceptance Factor and GF Acceptance Factor, respectively).
XBMC is idiot proof. They turn it on and it works. I use ccxstream instead of Samba because I have no reason to use Samba on my debian server.
It's hard to explain if you've never seen it in action. If I go over to a friend's house and we want to watch some movies I can ftp them to the hard drive, toss the XBOX in my backpack and go. Almost all TVs on the market have RCA inputs. If I lose my remote I can pull up http://xbox/ on my laptop and play media.
XBMC is an amazing piece of OSS. The interface keeps getting more and more polished. The only downside is the Xbox is starting to show its age. If I could get XBMC on an AppleTV and use the exact same interface, I would.