Just being able to have all your movies, television shows, music videos, pictures, and music at the touch of a few buttons is pretty cool, but that's not all that XBMC is capable of. Add-ons expand XBMC's capabilities, so you can do other cool things such as playing video and music from streaming sites such as YouTube, Vimeo, or archive.org. Apple device owners can also stream music, videos, and photographs to XBMC and their TV by configuring AirPlay on XBMC. If that wasn't cool enough, by enabling UPnP on XBMC and downloading a UPnP application to your smartphone or tablet, you can stream video in both directions (to and from your Android or iOS device). Live TV is becoming all the rage these days and we'll look at adding FilmOn—an add-on that has some live BBC shows. With all these cool additions, we need a quick way to access some of our favorite add-ons; we'll do that by setting up convenience add-on buttons that display under the main menu. Finally, we'll add some more third-party repositories for more skins and add-ons, and we'll finish by changing the scraper where the XBMC gets metadata for movies and television shows.
Add-ons extend XBMC's core functionality. There are add-ons for each of the pictures, videos, and music menu options. To access the Add-ons menu, either navigate to the Add-ons submenu of the main menu using the remote control or the keyboard arrow keys:
Most add-ons extend XBMC by interfacing with a website or web service. Because add-ons extend websites and services, and programmer APIs change from time to time, an add-on might be broken until the add-on developer can catch up with the site/API changes.
Once you've clicked on the Add-ons submenu, the Add-ons menu appears. If you've already added some add-ons, they'll be displayed in this submenu, if not, you'll see the following two options:
- Ellipsis to go up the menu structure
- The Get More option
Select Get More... to display add-ons for the menu category (for example, the video add-ons).
Each category—Pictures, Videos, and Music—has different add-ons for different services. To get more information about an add-on, select that add-on from the list. Add-ons display a graphic on the right-hand side (and sometimes a background image as well).
Selecting a particular add-on brings up more information about the add-on. The Configure, Update, Enable, and Rollback options are all disabled until the plugin is installed. Each add-on displays information about the following:
- Its type
- The author
- Version
- Rating
- A brief summary
- A more extensive description
- A disclaimer
Some add-ons require configuration before they can be used. Configuration can be as simple as a username and password, or have several tabs of options:
Setting a username and password for the YouTube add-on lets you view your customized YouTube content: contacts, playlists, subscriptions, uploads, YouTube suggestions, and videos you've liked on YouTube.
Some add-ons only work in a particular region of the world. Check the add-on description and disclaimer to be sure that the add-on will work for your particular region:
Quality of streams vary from add-on to add-on. Some streams are high definition, and some are standard definition. Also, streams that have poor compression ratios will appear to be poorer quality.
In the Apple ecosystem, devices can stream to each other using Apple's AirPlay proprietary protocol stack. XBMC 12 supports streaming from an Apple device via AirPlay, but the support must be enabled first.
To enable AirPlay support in XBMC, navigate to System | Services | AirPlay | Allow XBMC to receive AirPlay content:
You can also set a password to prevent neighbors with Apple devices from streaming to your XBMC media center. To set a password, simply select Use password protection, and then enter the password. In practice, this should work, but we found that we got a playback error streaming from our iPad when we set a password for AirPlay on our XBMCbuntu machines. This sometimes happens in all software, and usually gets fixed in an updated version.
To stream from your iPhone, iPad, or iPod to XBMC, perform the following steps:
- Select the application you want to stream from on the Apple device.
- Play the content and press the AirPlay icon.
- A flyout appears with the name of your Apple device, and the hostname of your XBMC machine. Select the XBMC machine name to start streaming:
Apple claims that over 50 applications support AirPlay. Popular AirPlay-enabled applications include videos, music, photos, and YouTube. For a complete list of AirPlay applications, see Apple's website at http://theapple.tv/apps/list-of-airplay-enabled-apps/.
Pictures streamed from iPad to XBMC-connected TV
Airplay mirroring is not supported at the moment so playback is restricted to XBMC itself. The one exception seems to be the Photos application, which can play a slideshow simultaneously and display on XBMC.
Tablets and smartphones are wonderful because they're so portable. But portability comes with a cost—storage. Most of today's portable devices cannot store more than a handful of DVD-quality videos. This is where a lot of storage on your XBMC system comes in handy. Besides being able to get streams from Apple devices via AirPlay, XBMC can also stream to devices that support the Universal Plug and Play protocol (UPnP).
This means that whether you are at home or work, you can watch movies and listen to the music collection you have stored on your XBMC media center.
Streaming to your phone or tablet doesn't affect the XBMC server, so you can safely watch a video on your phone while doing another activity on the XBMC media center.
Before you can stream to your Android, iOS, or other handheld device via UPnP, you first need to follow some important steps. The steps may vary slightly depending on what phone or tablet you use. For our example, we're using an Android 2.3 phone running BubbleUPnP.
UPnP options are turned off in XBMC by default. There are three UPnP options, which can be set in XBMC. To access the UPnP menu navigate to System | Services | UPnP.
Select Share videos and music libraries through UPnP to be able to access your movies, television shows, music videos, and music through the UPnP protocol.
You'll probably also want to see when your libraries change on XBMC, so select the Announce library updates via UPnP option as well.
The third option, Allow control of XBMC via UPnP, allows applications that support UPnP to control XBMC. Enabling this option allows you to stream from your smartphone to your XBMC media center or another UPnP-capable device.
It should be noted that you do not need UPnP enabled on your router for UPnP to work within your own network, and it's recommended that you turn UPnP off on your router, because it presents a back-door entry for people looking to break into your network.
Before playing the content, we need a program that understands the UPnP service. For Android devices, we like the BubbleUPnP application. BubbleUPnP is straightforward and currently runs on older versions of Android (2.3).
Download BubbleUPnP from the Google Play Store on your Android device or at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bubblesoft.android.bubbleupnp.
iOS users should check out 8player at https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/8player/id375860275?mt=8 or from the iTunes store.
Most phones and tablets have some sort of in-built media-playing software. Our experience is that most in-built media-playing software has a limited range of media codecs supported. On Android, Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X, we recommend using Video Lan Client (VLC) because of the wide range of codecs it supports. On Android phones, you can install VLC from the Google Play Store. For most other operating systems, visit http://www.videolan.org/vlc/.
When you launch BubbleUPnP for the first time, you'll notice a menu bar at the bottom with four items: NOW PLAYING, PLAYLIST, LIBRARY, and DEVICES. Select the DEVICES menu choice. On the renderer's side, make sure Local Renderer is selected. On the Libraries side, make sure your XBMC server hostname is selected.
In BubbleUPnP, click on the LIBRARY menu option. Take note of the XBMC server name and the arrow at the top-left corner. BubbleUPnP displays the options: Music Library, Video Library, Albums, Folders, Saved Playlists, Recently Played, and Random Tracks. Choose the type of content you want. These menus somewhat closely resemble the submenus in XBMC. For example, under Video Library, you'll see Movies, TV Shows, Music Videos, In progress TV shows, Recently added movies, and so on.
It seems that every day more and more services move online. Television is one of those services where more and more content is being reproduced and streamed online. XBMC can be used to watch TV from online services.
We'll enable streaming live and pre-recorded TV in XBMC for the FilmOn service.
Adding FilmOn is a fairly involved process that takes 20 steps to complete. We'll divide the steps into three larger steps.
To enable FilmOn, we first need to add a third-party repository (collection of software) for fusion.xbmchub.com. To do this we need the following five steps:
- Navigate to the System menu option then select File Manager.
- Select Add source.
- Select the <none> field, and in the window that pops up enter
http://fusion.xbmchub.com/, then click the OK button. - In the Enter a name for this media source option, enter
Fusion. - Click on OK.
At this point we've added http://fusion.xbmchub.com as a network mount point.
In the next set of steps we'll install a ZIP file from that mount point that gives more information about the XBMCHUB repository:
- Press the Esc key (or back arrow on your remote) until you're at the main XBMC menu.
- Select System then select Add-ons.
- Select Install from zip file.
- Select the red Fusion drive/mount point.
- Navigate to and select Video.
- Navigate to and select Repositories.
- Navigate to and select the repository that begins with
repositories.xbmchub. The ZIP file will install.
A notification will appear in the bottom-right-hand corner of the screen notifying us about whether or not the repository installed.
At the time of writing there were 46 web services available through the fusion.xbmchub repository. To enable FilmOn, perform the following steps:
- Select Get Add-ons from the Add-ons menu.
- Select XBMCHUB.com Add on Repository.
- Select Video Add-ons.
- Navigate to and select FilmOn.
- Click on Install.
At this point FilmOn is installed and available.
To play channels from FilmOn, return to the main XBMC menu, select Videos, select Add-Ons, and then select the FilmOn add-on.
Once you've installed a bunch of add-ons, navigating through these submenus can be a bit of a pain. XBMC lets you assign up to five add-ons to the main screen for each of pictures, videos, and music.
Adding convenience add-on buttons to the main menu has changed since XBMC Version 11. In XBMC 12 and later, for adding convenience add-on buttons, perform the following steps:
- Select System.
- Select Appearance.
- Select Skin. Navigate to and select the Settings option on the right-hand side just under Skin.
- Navigate to Add-on shortcuts.
- Navigate to Add-on 1 through Add-on 5 for each of Home Page Videos, Home Page Music, Home Page Pictures, and Home Page Programs to select an add-on to appear under the main menu for each option.
XBMC maintains a list with a large number of third-party repositories for different add-ons and skins at http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=3rd_party_add-on_repositories.
You've already added the Fusion XBMCHUB repository if you completed the steps under the Watching live TV from Internet sources section. We could repeat similar steps for each of these repositories, but there's an easier way as shown in the following steps:
- On your XBMC machine download the required file from http://passion-xbmc.org/addons/Download.php/plugin.program.repo.installer/plugin.program.repo.installer-1.0.5.zip. (I use SSH and wget to download plugins, but you can also transfer them from your main computer using FileZilla or Samba, as we did with our media data earlier).
- Select System.
- Select Add-ons.
- Select Install from zip file.
- Navigate to your
Downloadsfolder where you saved theplugin.program.repo.installer-1.0.5.zipfile and select it. - Escape out to the main menu.
- Select Programs.
- Select Repository Installer.
Now you can select from many of the repositories listed on the XBMC site. Alternatively, if you don't want to install the repository installer plugin you can download each ZIP file listed on the wiki link provided earlier and install each individually.
In XBMC, metadata scrapers are tiny pieces of code that scrape particular Internet sources for information about movies and television shows. Occasionally, an Internet source is down or the source doesn't have a particular movie. In these cases, it's desirable to change which Internet source is being scraped. The process is basically the same for both movies and television shows. We'll change a movie scraper. First the new scraper needs to be installed.
To install a scraper for a movie source, perform the following steps:
- Navigate to the Videos main menu and select the Files sub-menu.
- On the source you've added (Movies, for example) press c or the guide button on your remote to bring up a context menu.
- Select Edit Source.
- Select OK.
- In the set content dialog box, navigate to the Choose Scraper section and click get more.
- Select the movie scraper Internet source you want.
- Select Install on the Add-on Information screen.
Now the new Internet source is installed, but it's not enabled yet. To enable a different scraper:
- Navigate to the Videos main menu and select the Files submenu.
- On the source you've added (Movies, for example) press c or the guide button on your remote to bring up a context menu.
- Select Edit Source.
- Select OK.
- In the Set Content dialog box, navigate to the Choose Scraper section and select the scraper you just installed.