Xbox Media Center, The new (ad)venture | News

xboxmediacenter (xbmc) is a new free open source (gpl) multimedia player for microsoft’s xbox. xboxmediacenter is still in beta stage but can currently be used to play and view most video/audio/picture formats such as mpeg/mpg, vob, avi, ogm, divx, xvid, mp3, ogg, jpg, gif and many more direct from a cd/dvd in the dvd-rom or of the xbox build-in hard disk drive, it can also play files over a network (lan) from a pc via an “xstream server” application or from a windows (smb) share. it has playlist + slideshow functions as well as the ability to function as a full replacement xbox dashboard. these and more features enables the xbox running xboxmediacenter to fully function as a multi-media jukebox. xboxmediacenter also known as “xbox media center” or simply “xbmc”.

this project is what the active official xbox media player developers have been working on in secret for the last 4-6 months. this does not mean the xbox media player is dead, official and unofficial developers will still be adding new code and maintain it but the lead developers will be focusing on xbmc. remember that xbmc and xbmp are hobby projects and are only developed by volunteers in their spare-time for free.

new and big differences compared to xboxmediaplayer:

entire new fully skinnable gui engine
easy switching between skins (if exist)
dynamic loader for multiple cores/engines
music database with search feature
sort files/folders by name, size or date
file manager for dvd-rom/hdd/network
virtual keyboard
cddb and album cover/info lookup
movie calibration per resolution
ui calibration

things that are not supported in xbmc yet:

dvd-movie playback
audio visualization
matroska file container
windows dll’s (wmv/wma 9)
ftp-server
shoutcast
tv-guide

note! normal retail xboxes require a modchip with hacked a bios for xboxmediacenter to run.

official website: www.xboxmediacenter.com
official mirror: www.xboxmediacenter.de
offical xbmc forums: xbmc forums
sourceforge project site: xbmc