XBMC-Linux port progress & info.

I've been a huge fan of the XBMC (formerly XBOX Media Center)
application for a long time now. I've used it near-daily on a couple
of modded xbox consoles as a media-player / htpc front-end of sorts
since early 2004.

As the original xbox was a limited platform that started to show it's
age and limitations as HD content became more and more commonplace (it
simply doesn't have the hardware to properly decode and play >=720p
content). Since last 2007, the XBMC.org developers have been working
(slowly) at porting XBMC from the original platform, out to linux, osx
and windows. As XBMC for the xbox was a mature and high functioning
application with over 5 years of development, the alternate-OS ports
require very little growth to meet or beat the builds from the
original platform.

It's still pretty early in the development progress, but overall the
individual OS builds are so close to functional that they may as well
be. I've personally tested the builds for all three operating
systems, and have by and large ahd the best results with the linux
port (as it has the most active development). That includes a
basically functional OpenGL/SDL Win32 build from the linux port SVN
this past weekend.

Some of the new features showing up on XBMC now that PC/Apple hardware
is an option include;

- GPU assisted video decoding (best with nvidia gpu's as ATI's linux
drivers aren't fully working for XvMC as of yet).
- MythTV back-end integration (still in it's infancy, but progressing quickly).
- IMDB/TVDB hooks (including album/cover art and imdb info pages for
content previews).
- Cwiid support (super easy to set up a Nintendo Wii controller as a
bluetooth remote to control XBMC)
- Further Cwiid support (basic sensorbar support to use the Wii-mote
for mouse emulation in XBMC)

While I'm sure I'm not the only one on the list who's madly in love
with XBMC as a medicenter application, I just can't contain myself and
wondered if anyone else has been playing with the other-os ports.

info - http://www.xbmc.org or http://www.xbmcbuilder.com (the latter
is a quick and dirty site I threw together in Joomla to act as an XBMC
news aggregate).
Received on Tue Mar 11 09:25:49 2008