Hi all,
I’m not gonna talk about Galaxy S right now. Instead, I’ll talk about freeware (again). You know for this past few months I’ve been interested with HTPC and media players such as WDTV live, or MEDE8ER 500DX. I kept reading and following news and information about them and then it came to a point where I got confused, which one should I choose? building HTPC or just buying a media center…. but if I chose buying a media center, which one is the best? which one is more hackable? and such and such…
So the reason I got confused between choosing 2 solution above and kept following news about them is that I have lots of music collection, TV series collection (most of them are animes), pictures, and movies and last but not least music videos. All these times I use different applications to view them. Faststone viewer for image viewer, Foobar2000 for music, and CCCP codec & media player classic to watch the movies. At first I did all these activity just in front of my 14″ laptop screen. But right now, I plugged my laptop’s display to my LCD TV and that changed the way I view my medias.
Having bigger display and able to watch HD movie better (okay, only 720p.. my LCD is not full HD yet 
) force me to watch the display further from the screen and I feel more like dealing with multimedia station than dealing with a computer. I know I’m a bit exaggeratimg, but what I’m talking about is the feel when watching movies or listening to music (now I can enjoy milkdrop visualization better when it displayed on big screen). Having this kind of setup makes me a little bit lazy to navigate through medias from Windows explorer and using mouse from a distance.. And here’s where XBMC plays a very useful part filling the limitation of media handling.
Overall, XBMC acts like Windows Media Center, but better 😀 It’s more flexible, lots of enhancement, continous version update, and… FREE!! It also supports different OSes. Maybe you can read more information from Wikipedia. Here’s the general information from Wikipedia:
XBMC Media Center (which was formerly named Xbox Media Center) is a free and open source cross-platform media player and home entertainment system software with a 10-foot user interfacedesigned for the living-room TV. Its graphical user interface allows the user to easily manage video, photos, podcasts, and music from a computer, optical disc, local network, and the internet using a remote control
I think too many words just confusing, so I’ll show the GUI of XBMC (I took these pictures from XBMC site)
Main Menu
Movie Library
Movie Playlist
Movie Playback
Movie Library (alternate)
Music Library
Music Playlist
Music Playback
Wheather Screen
TV Series Library
Pretty nice huh? Especially if you look at it from a big screen. This is the default skin called Confluence. Wait till you see other skins like Aeon (I’ll put the screenshots later on..)
Download
Here’s the link to download the latest version :
- XBMC site -> the latest one is version 10 – Dharma
Recommended Configurations:
To get the most experience from having XBMC as your multimedia manager, you should have these configurations (my preference though.) :
- An HTPC or media centric PC
- I recommend to have a decent PC system which able to play HD movie (Bluray or other formats) flawlessly.
- The system should silent enough to be run (you don’t wanna be disturbed by your noisy pc during watching a movie do you?)
- The system should be able to suck as low power as possible (just power consumption conscious and stay on budget especially for electricity)
- Large storage
- Having several harddisk to store your organized media collection sometimes more than enough but also sometimes not enough to store your movie collections. So, get as much hardisk as possible 😛
- TV with at least HD ready capability
- LCD TV is so cheap these days. But if you can buy a 32″-42″ LED TV, just go for it. You’ll see that watching full 1080 movies in your room is very nice experience to have. Trust me.. 😀
- Decent sound system ( at least 2.1 configuration)
- Connect your speaker to your TV setup and you will see that watching 1080 movie and listens its sound from built in TV sucks..
- Dedicated remote control
- plug a MCE ready remote control and use it to navigate xbmc system and reduce keyboard usage during time like these. These kinds of remote really helps
- Popcorn. Lots of them
Veenone's place 