Welcome to Instant XBMC. This book has been especially created to provide you with all the information that you need to get set up with XBMC. You will learn the basics of XBMC, get started with building your first course, and discover some tips and tricks for using XBMC.
XBMC is one of those programs that looks simple, but has a host of features that don't get used much. This book attempts to rectify this by getting you speed on topics, such as the quickest way to install XBMC on a new system, preparing and adding movies, television shows, and music, playing content from Internet sources, beautifying XBMC with skins, and streaming using phones and tablets.
As we become increasingly connected, we consume more and more multimedia content on a variety of devices. We're not just sitting in front of the television and the DVD player anymore, but watching and listening to media on notebooks, phones, tablets, and other smart devices. Convergence of media across these devices grows more important. Your smartphone might be limited to 16 GB of storage, but imagine for a moment, being able to play at the touch of your screen 2 TB (or more) of your digital media library available whenever you connect to your wireless network; that is the power of XBMC.
We use XBMC in a variety of ways for entertaining. Some guests want to see a slideshow of pictures accompanied with music. Other guests are more partial to playing music videos. And when children come, we hook them up with a children's movie which we know will entertain them (usually). It's for those friends who've asked how they can get their own XBMC system up and running that this book is for.
XBMC has a very simple looking interface. Underneath the hood, it isn't so simple. Setting up XBMC can be a chore, especially on difficult hardware or when it comes to playback codecs for different multimedia formats. What do you do if things don't look right? Although this book is meant as a quick guide to XBMC, I have touched on solving some of these problems so you can get XBMC up and running quickly.
This book is written in a linear fashion. You can read it from start to finish.
This book contains the following sections:
So, what is XBMC? gives you a sense of what really makes XBMC so popular. Find out what XBMC actually is, what you can do with it, and why it's so great.
Installation covers how to choose the right hardware (or version of XBMCbuntu for your existing hardware), how to install XBMCbuntu with a minimum of fuss, and what to do if the display doesn't look right. You will learn how to download and install XBMC with the minimum fuss and then set it up so that you can use it as soon as possible.
Quick start – media files and XBMC covers the basics of XBMC, such as how to name and organize your media so XBMC will correctly scrape information about it, adding media to XBMC via Samba or SSH, setting up XBMC to scrape metadata about your media collection, a couple of ways to play content back, and changing XBMC's default skin to better suit your tastes. This section will also show you how to perform some of the core tasks of XBMC; for example, adding pictures, music, and video from local and network sources.
Top 6 features you need to know about helps you learn about some of the cooler, but challenging features, such as playing streaming Internet content via add-ons; streaming content from your iPad, iPhone, or iPod to XBMC via Airplay; streaming to other devices via Universal Plug and Play (UPnP); watching TV from Internet sources; adding third party repositories for more add-ons and skins; and changing metadata sources, so if one goes out you have another to rely on. Here, you will learn how to perform five tasks with the most important features of XBMC. By the end of this section, you will be able to change the appearance of XBMC using skins; change the online source from where XBMC gets artwork and metadata; download and install add-ons for Internet content streaming; enable Airplay so you can stream your music and movies from your iPod, iPad, or iPhone; and enable UPnP to stream content from your XBMC machine to your smartphone or tablet.
People and places you should get to know lists every open source project that is centered around a community. This section provides you with many useful links to the project page and forums, as well as a number of helpful articles, tutorials, blogs, and the Twitter feeds of XBMC rockstars. XBMC has an amazing community, so amazing that it has spawned several distributions of XBMC, and on any given day, at any given time you can find approximately 500 people in the XBMC Internet Relay Chat channel on Freenode. Look 0n YouTube and you'll find hundreds of videos on XBMC-related topics. It's a project that generates a lot of excitement. If you ever get stuck, there's an enormous community backing XBMC and several ways to get more information: wiki, forums, and chat. Many of these sources are documented at the end of Instant XBMC.
XBMC is a software media center for playing and streaming multimedia content. There are lots of multimedia centers available, but only a few can run on the range of hardware XBMC can run on and few can play the number of formats it can play. Besides playing a large number of video and music file formats, XBMC can display pictures and show the weather conditions for most of the major cities in the world. Add-ons extend its capabilities so you can listen to Internet radio, watch Internet videos, play games, interact with Facebook, check your Gmail account, or even control ambient lighting in your living room.
XBMC is designed to look great on big screen televisions, but it also looks and works surprisingly well on modern notebooks, tablets, and phones. Official versions of XBMC are available for Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, Android, Apple TV (jailbroken) boxes, the Raspberry Pi, iOS (jailbroken devices), and as a prepackaged complete Linux + software solution. XBMC is licensed under the GNU General Public License v2 or later, which means you can even download the source code and modify XBMC if you wanted to. Boxee, another well-known media center, was originally a fork of the XBMC code.
Once properly configured, XBMC automatically scans collections of videos and music and fetches movie, television shows, and music metadata. Want subtitles? XBMC can download those too. Got an iPod, iPad, or iPhone? You can stream content from those devices to your XBMC computer using Airplay, Apple's proprietary protocol stack for streaming audio, video, and photographs. Using Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) you can even stream from your XBMC computer to your phone or tablet; so no matter where you are in your house or business (Provided your XBMC machine is on the same network), you can watch your movies or television shows, or listen to your music collection.
Best of all, XBMC can be controlled from your iPod/iPad/iPhone, Android device, Windows phone, or with common Windows Media Center remote controls making it easy for anyone in the house to navigate to the type of content they want to watch. This also means as long as you have your phone or iPod handy, you'll never be without a remote (where did that remote go?).
Tip
Downloading the color images of this book
We also provide you a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. The color images will help you better understand the changes in the output. You can download this file from http://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/6869OT_Instant-XBMC.pdf