XBMC is an award winning media center for Linux, Mac, Windows and XBox. First thanks to this post which I stumbled and discovered about XBMC. Now I am going to tell you about my experience about XBMC.

First add these lines to your third party software sources list:

• deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/team-xbmc-hardy/ubuntu hardy main
• deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/team-xbmc-hardy/ubuntu hardy main

Then save and reload your repositories, you can also do this from terminal by typing

• sudo apt-get update

Now after the update is finished, you can install xbmc by typing this line in the terminal

• sudo apt-get install xbmc

You can start XBMC by navigating to Applications -> Sound & Video ->XBMC Media Center

I instantly liked this application, the screens, the navigation and everything is good looking. I used another media center application by name Entertainer but I liked XBMC more. Entertainer didn’t work well while compiz is running you need to use matacity for it to display properly. It also created tiny image thumbnails of the contents of the pictures folder in each folder. On the other hand XBMC has no problem loading while compiz is running and views are really good. Though I find one proble with XBMC is playing DVD’s. It loaded the DVD properly but started playing it very fastly as if you press fast forward. It even loaded iso file but same problem with it, it’s playing the movie as if your’re fast forwarding it might be that it is a beta version. It had no problems playing avi files, flv or any other video files it played perfectly well.

Check out some of my screen shots of XBMC.

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