XBMC, formerly known as Xbox Media Center, is a great multimedia playback application that is ideal for HTPC setups. Home Theater PC's are often connected to large TVs and the user does not sit close to the TV. Also, a keyboard and mouse are rarely connected to them. This makes XBMC, and its 10-foot interface an ideal match for this type of setups.
The application will scan your folders in search of videos, music, TV shows and other content. It will play pretty much any file that you throw at it. The artwork for movies and TV shows, and even music will be automatically downloaded once your files are indexed. There are many different views for you to browse your content, and they all look great. There is also extensive support for user-created addons, which let you access services that are not available by default, like YouTube, ESPN, and a number of other content providers.
XBMC is available in many different platforms, including Windows, Mac OS X, Android, and even iOS. Remote apps can also be used to control XBMC on your Mac from a mobile device like a phone or tablet.
XBMC is updated somewhat regularly. The current version is 12.2 Frodo, but the version 13 is around the corner. Many new features, interface changes and performance fixes have come since the last review of XBMC on Mac Informer. The most evident change is the use of a horizontal home layout skin. It looks so much better and it is easy to read from a distance. An important addition is the combined mode for video files and library entries, which makes finding files a lot easier. Support for ISO playback (great for BD movie rips), Slingbox and Airplay capabilities and the upgrade of FFMPEG decoding are only a few of the many important changes that this app has seen in the past two versions. For a complete list of changes make sure you check the Releases Page of the XBMC Wiki.
In short, XBMC is still my favorite HTPC app. It looks great, works awesome and it has never caused a problem for me.
v11.0 [Feb 10, 2012]
- Added ability for all addons to provide their own Web interface (and handling of multiple Web interfaces)
- Added support for addons to save their setting values to their own settings.xml file before quitting
- Added support for multi-file selections in the (python) file browser dialog
- Extended Addons API to support adding extension points for Service Addons (xbmc.service)
- Added support for Addon Rollbacks, enabling users to choose previously installed addons over more recent revisions
- Added the ability to search Addons in the Addons-ManagerGUI Engine
- Improve XBMC's GUI Engine / Skinning Framework making it even more flexible and powerful
- Added option for auto login of a specific selected user profile (good for kiosk mode)
- Added commands for xbmc.Player().getAvailableAudioStreams() and xbmc.Player().setAudioStream()
- Added support to identify DTS-HD (DTS-HD MA and DTS-HD HRA) profiles in audio stream list
- Add ability for skinners to show buffering progress for streamed/cached files (similar to YouTube)
- Improved mouse support, add better control for dragging of seek / slide / scroll bars, and click handling
- Improve touch interface API and gesture support for XBMC's GUI Engine for all platforms
- Added Dirty Region support to reduce CPU usage
- Added a custom JPEG decoder, at least 2x faster than the previous implementation (cximage)Playback:
- Added UDF 2.5 filesystem reading support to XBMC's VFS (Virtual File System)
- Added support for direct playback of ISO image files for Blu-ray Disc as well as video library integration
- Added an option for vertical shift of video image with slider setting
- Added support for color and font styles tag in MPL2 (MicroDVD) subtitles
- Added support for SSA/ASS subtitle tags; italics, bold, and color for SubRip (.srt) subtitles
- Added support for MP4 embedded subtitles
- Added support delay tag in vobsub subtitles
- Gave external subtitles preference over internal subtitles
- Added support for a new extended version of MPlayer's EDL (Edit Decision List) format
- Added PlayerControl built in function to allow jumping to a percentage offset from a key mapping
- Added support for Slingbox
- Upgrade FFmpeg (libavformat and libavcodec) audio/video codec and demux library
- Improved Blu-ray Disc and harddrive playback support of unencrypted bdmv and mpls files without menus
- Removed subtitle caching (as it was only needed on Xbox because of the severe memory restrictions)
- Removed all dependencies of libmms libraries from XBMC's code in favour of FFmpeg native MMS support
- Remove all dependencies of liba52, libdts, and faac libraries from XBMC's code in favour of FFmpeg native
- Added support for NFS virtual file server (vfs) (all platforms)
- Added support for AFP (vfs) (all platforms aside from Windows)
- Added Airplay support for Videos/Pictures (all platforms)
- Added Airplay support for Music (all platforms aside from Windows)
- Added Audio/L16 support for better DLNA UPnP client compliance
- Improved UPnP Renderer
- Added a slider for volume amplification and dynamic range compression during video playback
- Added an option to pause video playback during refreshrate changes
- Extended PathSubstitution from playlists to all files for users of shared MySQL Databases
- Added the ability to adjust the display's refresh rate to match the video's frame rate in OSX (Feature already available in Windows and Linux)
- Improvements made to the adjust refresh rate feature to pick the "best" rate, rather than the closest multiple
- Added DXVA Deinterlacing supportLibrary:
- Combined Files and Library mode for videos
- Add asynchronous threaded background loading of metadata to XBMC's VFS (Virtual File System)
- Added support for cleaning the music library via CleanLibrary(music) command
- Added a "Play from here" context menu button for TV Shows Episodes in the video library
- Added the option to specify the default select (Play, Resume, Show information, Choose) action on videos
- Changed "Set Content" to "Edit Content Settings" after being set
- Added disc stub support for cataloging DVDs, BluRays, etc.
- Added support for scraping Movie Collections, along with the ability to toggle collections on and offScrapers:
- Improve TheMovieDB.org movie scraper by adding themoviedb.org posters scraping
- Added movie set scraping'
- Improve TheTVDB.com (Multi-Lingual) TV Shows and Episode scraper
- Improve Freebase (English) music scraperSkins:
- Confluence: Home screen switched to horizontal layout
- Confluence: Greatly simplified the way FanArt works throughout the skin and the settings for it
- Confluence: Added ability for users to easily add / remove Add-ons as items on the home screen menu
- Confluence: Added codec flagging images for DTS-HD Master Audio and DTS-HD High Resolution AudioOther:
- Added ability to handle and allow access to multiple Web interfaces at once
- Added option setting to play videos within picture slideshows
- Added dimming setting to the built-in picture slideshow screensaver
- Added support for sorting depending on current locale
- Added advancedsettings.xml option to disable the display of startup splash image (enabled by default)
- Added support for batch requests to the JSON-RPC API
- Added support for requests by notification to the JSON-RPC API
- Make JSON-RPC API compliant with JSON-RPC 2.0 specification ( details)
- Cleanup and improve JSON-RPC API
- Added advancedsettings.xml option to configure the TCP port used by JSON-RPC (default is 9090)
- Improve the features of the default Web interface
- Removed Weather from XBMC core and switched to Weather Underground as the default weather provider addon
- Added weather lookup by IPiOS Specific:
- Ported XBMC to iOS 4.x (adding "XBMC for iOS" to XBMC's existing list of supported operating-systems)
- Added support for Apple A4 (ARM) iDevices, inc. Apple TV 2G, iPhone 4, iPod Touch 4G, the iPad (effectively all jailbroken iOS products)
- Added hardware accelerated video decoding support for H.264 decode on iOS via Apple's VideoToolBox API
- Added support for OpenGL ES hardware accelerated rendering of XBMC's graphical user interface on iOS
- Added retina support
- Added initial iOS Touch / Gesture / Inertial Scrolling support for XBMC interface on iPhone 4, iPod Touch 4G, and the iPad
- Added a APT repository for Apple TV, and Cydia with packages for iPhone 4, iPod Touch 4G, and iPadMac OS X Specific:
- Added dynamic runtime detection of CPU features (MMX, SSE, 3DNow, etc.) implementation for Mac OS X
- Improve Apple VDADecoder Video Acceleration support (requires Snow Leopard and NVIDIA 9400 or later)
- Improve XBMC's build system to make compiling XBMC much easier
