when I heard about XBMC (thank-you Strider & DaddyX3) I thought "that's a weird name, how good can it be if they can't even name it something that makes sense", but it seemed to be well received by 2 people who had pretty good judgement, so I decided to check it out. Since it wasn't in the repo's, I went looking for a .deb and was surprised to find there wasn't any in the obvious places. This made me curious, I mean it was ported to several different platforms so it must be pretty well liked, but how do I get it? After further poking around I found the answer was simple. Add these 2 repo's to my sources
Hardy
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/team-xbmc-hardy/ppa/ubuntu hardy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/team-xbmc-hardy/ppa/ubuntu hardy main
Intrepid
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/team-xbmc-intrepid/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/team-xbmc-intrepid/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main
and install the components from synaptic.
Yep! Just that simple.
Cool! Lets watch a movie and see how good it is.
Oops! Not quite so simple since setting it up isn't real intuitive.
Took me a few passes, (with the layers of menus inside menus and right clicking got me a different menu one time and killed it the next) to point it to my movies and they played really well... I think, how can I tell when I can't make it play full screen?
Back to my Best buddy, Google, for information.
It seems if I hit the \ key, it plays without even showing that annoying tool bar at the top, How cool is that! Don't get me wrong, I'd have to hurt the poor soul that took my tool bar away from me, but that doesn't mean I want it there while I'm watching a movie on my 92" screen. Ya, give me the option. A big plus!
Now I can see that the movies that played pretty good on the other players are playing in HD.
Yes, High Def from an .avi! I am so sold!
I was quite happy to find the movie player interface had a few features not found on other payers.
If you stop in the middle of a movie, it will give you the option to resume from where you left off, next time you select that movie. Months down the road and multiple reboots later, you can pick up where you left off.
Ever been watching a movie and a few minutes in needed to change the aspect ratio?
Well it has a feature to do that on the fly. Yes you can do that without stopping the movie.
Want to change the sound? You can do that on the fly as well.
Contrast, brightness, subtitles and a slew of other options can all be changes on the fly.
Ever been watching a movie and wanted to come back to a specific place later on?
You can bookmark that place, on the fly of course, to come back to later.
Ya it got skills!
My googling also discovered that the name wasn't so strange after all XBox Media Center.
This most definitely NOT my kid's Xbox, this was one piece of software for adults.
Talking to DaddyX3 about it, I found out that there were layers upon layers yet undiscovered.
I had it set up to simply display a picture from the movie for the thumbnail, but he told me I was missing out on some of the "slick coolness" and could set it up to have it display the cover art for each movie, and it could do this automatically each time I put new movies in my folder. Now it looks like I have a wall of DVD jackets lined up, waiting to be chosen. Slick Coolness indeed!
I didn't think much about the weather section, (by simply passing the cursor over the weather section, it will display the temp, and the current forecast) I mean who cares what the weather is in "New York" "London" or "Toyko" unless you live there, but of course we get back to the layers again. You can set it for 3 ANY decent size towns you want. This may seem like a little thing, but being a true nocturnal geek, I firmly believe if you can tell what time of the day it is without looking at the clock on your desktop, you don't have the right curtains. So being able to pass the cursor over the weather section and instantly have it tell me, it's cold and wet outside, I choose wisely to play on my box all day or it's pretty nice outside, I better get up off my lazy backside and go finish the yard while I can, is a pretty nice feature.
What can I say about the music section.
There are so many music players out there that do so many different things in so many different ways, it's hard to stand out from the crowd. It flawlessly plays any format I've put in, automatically downloads the cover art, and has a selection of visuals if you happen to be in the Mind Altering mood. As with the other sections, there are probably levels to this that I haven't yet discovered.
The pictures section doesn't include any image manipulation tools but gives you all the options that any of the better picture viewers include and displays in stunning clarity. Again, High Def.
The scripts section, while I haven't played with it and can't think of anything that was left out by the dev's, was a real pleasant surprise. I mean who would think to include a section where you could store and easily implement your custom scripts. A section for power users! Yet more Slick Coolness.
The only downfall that I could find was a lack of a "Music Video" section.
Don't get me wrong, they play exceedingly fine in the "movie" section, it's just that they don't have any of the exceptional extra options that I've come to expect in the other sections. Yes, I've become that spoiled since I started using it.
If you haven't checked it out yet, you're robbing yourself of greatness!
If you've discovered any new layers, please post them in this thread.