| By Jason Fitzpatrick The Ultimate Start to Finish Guide to Your XBMC Media Center
We've featured quite a few XBMC tips, tricks, and guides here at Lifehacker. We're quite fond of it, and with good reason: It's attractive, powerful, and highly customizable. In fact, nearly everyone at Lifehacker has a copy installed somewhere—and I have XBMC networked and running on every television and computer in my house. Rather than leave you to dig through the archives of all the tips and guides we've shared, today we're going to walk you through our guides covering everything from installation to tweaking your media and media center for the ultimate XBMC experience, start to finish. Rather than rehash the detailed instructions we've laid out in various guides, we'll highlight the most compelling reasons for each tweak and direct you back to the original guide for a step-by-step walk through. When you're done, you'll have a streamlined media center with some awesome skins, a tidy media collection, automatic television show downloading, and games! Install XBMC
Everyone can grab a copy of XBMC for their respective operating system here. For additional guidance you'll want to check out our guides to installing XBMC on a USB drive, on a Mac, or if you have any troubles with the straight forward Windows install check out the XBMC for Windows wiki.
On the other hand, if you're feeling ambitious—and have a little extra cash to spend on this project—you'll definitely want to check out our guide to building a building a silent and standalone XBMC media center on the cheap. It really is dead silent, tiny, an excellent upgrade path from the classic Xbox architecture. Imagine squishing your classic Xbox down to the size of a paperback book—see the picture above—and upgrading the video output to 1080 and you've got the awesome nettop-based XBMC build we put together. Even if you don't opt to buy a new nettop for the project, using the XBMC LiveCD to install XBMC on an older machine is a great way to turn an otherwise lacking machine into a great, dedicated HTPC for media playback. I've installed XBMC from the LiveCD onto many an older box that wouldn't have done very well with Windows + XBMC for Windows but does HD playback easily with the lightweight version of Ubuntu that installs with XBMC from the LiveCD. Setup Your Remote
Be forewarned that in some situations, especially on Windows, configuring IR remotes to work with XBMC can be a chore. On Windows, I've used both LIRC for Windows and EventGhost with success. You can read up on LIRC with our guide here or see an example of using EventGhost with XBMC here. Speaking from experience here, once you get your remote configured just the way you want make sure—extra, extra sure!—to back up your remote configuration file from your respective application. It's a pain to set up remote configuration files but if you back it up you'll only be doing it once.
Configuring the basic remote is a great start and many people won't need to venture beyond the basics, but this would hardly be a comprehensive guide if we didn't cover some of the other neat ways you can interact with your XBMC. After recently upgrading to an Android-based phone, I started experimenting with this Android remote control for XBMC—seen in the screenshot above—which essentially turns my phone into a wireless touchscreen remote that can access any of my XBMCs and browse their music and movie collections. If you have an Android, iPhone, or Windows Mobile phone you'll want to check out the remote applications available for them. I can't say enough good things about Android remote control for XBMC. It even supports multiple XBMCs so I can swap music in one part of the house while queuing up a movie in another—amazing!
Even if you don't have a phone, you can still enhance your XBMC experience with computer-based remotes. XBMC has a built-in web server with a remote tool and a variety of small applications like XBMC Control—seen in the screenshot above—make it easy to control your music or video playback from your netbook, laptop, or desktop—quite handy for changing the music playing through the living room stereo from your office. Check out our full guide to enhancing your XBMC experience with remote controls for any device for more information. Make It Pretty
Aside from actually enjoying your media, showcasing it with a beautiful, easy-to-navigate skin is probably the best part of XBMC. Without fail every visitor who sees my setup asks me how much I paid for it and has trouble believing that something as polished and awesome as XBMC is available for free. There simply isn't a commercial media player that comes close to the "The future is now!" vibe of XBMC. I won't point fingers, but having played around with many of the commercial media devices on the market most of them have interfaces that look like they hail from last century. Read up on skinning your XBMC install here. If you want to keep on top of the latest skin developments and really see how far designers are pushing XBMC, you'll want to keep an eye on the skinning forum at XBMC.org. You'll find sub-forums there for popular skinning projects like Aeon, Confluence, and more. I've logged quite a bit of time over the years reading posts on the XBMC forums, it's a great place to get very specific help on nearly everything related to XBMC from install issues to little tweaks for your favorite skins. Massage Your Media for Maximum Wow Factor
Earlier this year we put together an extensive guide to getting your media collection in shape for XBMC. While the XBMC media scrapers do an admirable job on there own, there's no substitute for storing information about your media collection with the actual media collection instead of in the XBMC database.
Things run faster, restoration after a hard drive crash or an XBMC reinstallation takes minutes—instead of hours, hours, and more hours of rescraping your collection—and you get fine tuned control over your media. If you've ever had to leave your XBMC running for a 12 hour marathon of movie and music scraping or you've been annoyed at frequent mistakes from scrapers, you should take the time to clean up your media and start storing the media info with the media itself and not within the XBMC database. It's not as intimidating or as time consuming as it sounds, but you'll definitely want to make a weekend project of it if you've got a huge collection. Just be prepared to continually explain to guests that you didn't pay anything for the awesomeness they are experiencing. Automate TV Show Downloads
If you've never wrestled with cataloging lots of television shows before, we can't emphasize enough how much time an automated system like this will save you. XBMC isn't a TiVo but with an automatic workflow like the one outlined here, it might as well be. Fun and Games
Check out the tutorial to see how to use XBMC to catalog your computer games, emulators, and how to play them all with an Xbox 360 controller. Thanks to the guide, the only thing I missed from my classic Xbox is back in my media center menu. You don't need games on a media center, of course, but we're building the ultimate media center. The real measure of the ultimate media center is if it will stream the Super Mario Bros. movie, showcase the Super Mario Bros. Super Show!, and let you play Super Mario Bros. 3. Not to engage in some "Back when I was a lad..." nostalgia but I would have killed for a guide like this when I first started with XBMC. Back in the early days of XBMC, if you had a question about how something worked you hit up Google, the XBMC forums, and dug until you found some answers. Every new thing involved crazy tweaks, tinkering, swearing, and more digging in the forums for answers. Thankfully XBMC has evolved and now somebody with no prior experience can take a guide like this, work their way from the top of the list to the bottom, and be rewarded with a jaw dropping media center when they're done. Speaking of lists if you're feeling a little overwhelmed at all the stuff that goes into tweaking XBMC into an ultimate media center, check out the list below and schedule each step onto your calendar:
Have a favorite XBMC tweak or tip? Stuck trying to figure out how to do something with XBMC? Sound off in the comments to share your tweaks or get some help. Jason Fitzpatrick is an XBMC devotee who spreads the gospel of open-source media center magic whenever he can. If he hasn't already converted you to XBMC through the miracle of streaming media and meticulously cataloged movies it's only a matter of time. View comments »
| May 12th, 2010 Top Stories |
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