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What seemed impossible has finally happened. XBMC has been ported to the Popcorn Hour 100 series. The port is currently in beta phase and is only available on invite but my guess is that it wont take long before the project matures and releases a public version. This is of course good news for those who have a Popcorn Hour from the 100 series and would like to spice the interface to something with more eye candy. Check out the video below.
More information can be found on the Networked Media Tank forum.
About a month ago XBMC announced the new features for the next version of XBMC. These new features, although very useful and a step forward, might not mean that much for the average XBMC user that just want his home theater system to work. One of the features however will improve the user experience even for these average users. Yesterday the XBMC team announced that the new code for the addons manager and the basis for the PVR frontend will be added to the development branch of XBMC.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how to get BluRay playback within XBMC. At that time development on this issue had just started but I already predicted that this would continue. Now the next step has been taken. The original author of the script has created a plugin which makes it easier to manage your BluRay discs or ISO’s within XBMC.
A couple of days ago Boxee has announced they will be bringing paid content to their media center software. For those of you who dont know Boxee: Boxee is a fork of the popular XBMC media center software and is capable of playing all sorts of media when installed on a computer or HTPC. Compared the XBMC Boxee features some custom and proprietary additions and is more focused on social and online media.
The idea is that Boxee users will have the ability to buy content like TV shows and movies with a click of the remote. Content owners will be able to package and price as they wish, including pay-per-view and subscription. This could be a great step forward towards paid content as a countermeasure for piracy. I would love to see this in XBMC as well although I doubt this is gonna happen.
There are many people out there that have a Home Theater PC with Blu-ray drive (like the ASRock ION-330HT-BD) running with the mediaportal software XBMC. By default XBMC does not support original Blu-ray playback but it seems progress is being made on this from the XBMC community. A user named magnetism wrote a post on the forum of xbmc.org explaining how he fixed this issue. Below is a short tutorial as seen on the dutch site XBMCFreak.nl. Warning: from here on it is assumed you have basic knowledge of Linux and SSH.
Until recently (end of 2009) I used an old Xbox together with the multimediaplayer software XBMC to view movies and listen to music. I had been using this setup for years now and with great pleasure. But now that HD movies have become widely available and because the old Xbox can’t handle this resource intensive high quality media it was time for a change.
My research focused on the Popcorn Hour C-200 at first which was just announced at that time. The C-200 is a digital media player that will play almost any kind of media and that allows a harddrive and/or BluRay player to be added to the setup. The hardware looked perfect but I read a lot of negative reviews about the firmware and software. Also the screenshots of the software did not look very nice as I was used to XBMC by now. In the end I could not image not having XBMC to control my media as this is just the perfect software for the job. Not only does it look good, it’s open source and freely available as well. So I looked for another solution for my home theater setup. It didn’t take me long to find the ION-330 mini-pc serie from ASRock. This system, and especially the HT serie that come with a remote, is the perfect hardware in co-operation with XBMC as multimedia software to serve as HTPC.
My XBMC Installation Guide for ION-330HT
I had to do quite some reading to get the perfect setup. I decided to gather all this information and make my own installation guide. This installation guide can be useful to get you up and running in no time and it’s pretty dummy proof. But some of these steps can be quite challenging if you are inexperienced with Linux, SSH and computers in general. If this is the case, please ask someone with more experience to perform these actions for you. Although it’s not very likely that it will happen, I’m in no way responsible for damaging your system.
If you own a Home Theater PC like me, a new gadget has been announced that might be interesting to you. Boxee, the company that develops on XBMC based mediaplayers has announced a new remote control that features a QWERTY keyboard. This can ofcourse be very useful whila managing your system.
At the end of 2009 Boxee already announced a co-operation with D-Link to integrate the software from Boxee with the mediaplayers from D-Link. It now appears they are taking it a step further with a new remote that will be supplied with the D-Link mediaplayers but will also be sold seperately. Below are a couple of screenshots and the link to the original post by Boxee.
But some of these steps can be quite challenging if you are inexperienced with Linux, SSH and computers in general. If this is the case, please ask someone with more experience to perform these actions for you. Although it’s not very likely that it will happen, I’m in no way responsible for damaging your system.
