Too often lately I've been bitching in my blog, so I'm going to try and post more positive content.
I love my
XBMC.
The xbmc is a xbox that has been modified** to primarily play videos from either a large built-in IDE hard drive or over a network from a shared folder on a Windows PC.
Now I've had PCs connected to a TV before but it didn't work nearly as well as this does. Back in 2003 I had a spare PC that had a TV out and a wireless IR keyboard with thumb joystick mouse to play divx movies from. As nice as that sounds it had it's share of problems: it was still running XP and I'd have to sit there and wait for it to boot, text was fuzzy on the TV screen, couldn't adjust the boarders so some of the screen was cut-off, and navigating XP with a thumb joystick was a pain, but all of that was worth it compared to constantly buying and burning DVDs at 8x.
The XBMC has fixed all of those problems and then some. First, it was cheap, paid $70 on craigslist. Second, it's a xbox, it was designed to be connected to a TV, so video quality is excellent. The XBMC also has a display setting that allows you to set the borders so everything fits on the screen, even subtitle placement. And while you can use a xbox controller to navigate, there was a remote designed for the xbox that runs about $5 on ebay and it works great, with a dedicated button to go up a level in the directory tree, making it very easy to get to top level and then navigate through folders to get what you're looking for. It's also far smaller than a PC, much quieter and looks better sitting in an entertainment center than a PC.
Also has a host of other features like you can play games from the hard drive, view photos, play mp3s, check the weather, even automatically download synopsis and artwork for tv shows and movies.
The last feature I'd like is to be able to play content from iTunes. Unfortunately I haven't been able to get the xbmc to play .m4v video reliability and .m4v is what iTunes uses, so I'm still working on is finding a program that will automatically go through a directory (iTunes directory in this case) on the PC and transcode the videos into another format. I've tried a program call
ipodifier but I haven't been able to get it to convert videos.
But overall I've been very happy with the XBMC and anyone out there that still burns movies to DVD might want to look into getting one of these.
**It's not just for xboxs, XBMC currently runs on a variety of operating systems.