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).
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.
Playing a mp3 song – from my music collection (Hard-disk)
Browsing Pictures in XBMC –
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! 🙂
great