XBMC is a free and open source media player – more precisely a Media Center Application with a bunch of cool and exciting features, which can be easily extended using freely available plugins. It’s a cross-platform application – available not only for Ubuntu or other GNU/Linux distributions (including Linux Mint, Fedora, ArchLinux etc) but also for Windows and Mac OS X.

The fancy & cool UI (user interface) and ease of use made it an award winning Application – an complete Entertainment Hub; so it’s perfect for Home Theater Experience. XBMC supports all kinds of popular media formats and it can play from anywhere i.e either remote files or local files from your hard-disk (but it must be mounted, e.g if you’ve some media files on a partition that is not mounted on startup then obviously you have to mount those partitions manually before trying to access those partitions from XBMC Media Center).

xbmc-snapshot

Install XBMC on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS / 11.10

Open a terminal and execute these commands –

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:nathan-renniewaldock/xbmc-stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install xbmc

In Ubuntu there are already great media players available – the default one, VLC, etc but XBMC is some what different! If you’re running Ubuntu 11.10/12.04, then you must give it a try!

Here is few random snapshots of XBMC running on Ubuntu 12.04 (right now, i’m using Beta version, but stable will be out within a couple of months)

Installing Cool Add Ons in XBMC Media Center –

TV Guide – it’s a simple add-ons which will give you an overview about current TV programs.

xbmc-add-ons

Playing a mp3 song – from my music collection (Hard-disk)

xbmc-mp3

Browsing Pictures in XBMC –

view-pictures-xbmc

XBMC Settings

xbmc-settings

Recommended Reading(s)

  • XBMC.ORG – Visit official site for more goodies like – XBMC skins, plugins and scrips to customize it for complete Fun! 🙂

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