Media Center for your Linux

If you have used Windows 7, you should have used Windows Media Center. Impressed by its Eye Candy and capabilities? When I used Linux, I wanted to have a Media Center application like Windows Media Center. Fortunately, I got an amazing Media Center application, the XBox Media Center. XBMC is a great free, open source, cross platform media center application which is available for Linux, Windows, Mac OS and the original Xbox platform.

Having a large community for its developement, XBMC has a lot of features and eye catching skins, making it a perfect solution for your home theater. It has a powerful skinning engine. You can use XBMC as a standard media player application on your PC or also use on your HTPC. It also supports remote controls. The default skin is very beautiful and easy to use.

XBMC supports all popular audio and video formats allowing you to play whatever you like. It can play CDs and DVDs directly from the disk or image file, even files inside ZIP and RAR archives! You can also use it to stream multimedia content from the internet. It supports a huge number of multimedia protocols.

It will even scan all of your media and automatically create a personalized library complete with box covers, descriptions, and fanart. There are playlist and slideshow functions, a weather forecast feature and many audio visualizations. Once installed, your computer will become a fully functional multimedia jukebox.

To install XBMC on your Linux system, follow the steps below,

sudo apt-get install python-software-properties pkg-config
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install xbmc xbmc-standalone

If you use another platform, you can go to the XBMC download page to download XBMC for your platform.

In my opinion, XBMC is overally a great Media Center application for all platforms. What do you think?