Archive:Windows FAQ

XBMC for specific FAQs about XBMC running under Windows, Windows computer hardware, and Windows operating-system questions.

How many win32 ports are available ?

There are two existing Windows ports of XBMC

• XBMC.exe (build from the linux branch, using SDL/OpenGL)
• XBMC_PC.exe (build from the xbox trunk, using DirectX)

About XBMC.exe (SDL/OpenGL)

The SDL version is the Windows future of XBMC. The codebase is under development and is the base for the Linux, MacOSX and Windows ports. This FAQ will ONLY deal with the SDL version!
Note: The SDL win32 port still needs DirectX for the audio processing.

About XBMC_PC.exe (DirectX)

The DirectX version is only for skin and python development. You won't get support for it since it is only adapted to reflect the skin and python changes.

How to install XBMC SDL ?

Since XBMC win32 is still alpha there is no package which you can download and install. The next steps show you how to install XBMC from scratch (slightly modified version of keithskaggs)

• Download the latest T3CH build
• Download the SDL.NET package from http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=52340
  

(I didn't tested it as I used the libraries from www.libsdl.org)

• Download the OpenGL Extension Wrangler Library from https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=67586
• Download the latest compiled XBMC win32 executable from http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=87054&package_id=260464&release_id=585323
• Uncompress the T3CH build to the directory of your choice. To keep this example simple I’ll use E:\T3CH
• Uncompress the SDL-1.2.13-win32.zip file and copy the sdl.dll to your newly extracted E:\T3CH\XBMC directory
• Uncompress the glew-1.5.0-win32.zip file and copy the glew32.dll from the glew\bin directory to your newly extracted E:\T3CH\XBMC directory
• Uncompress XBMC_win32_rev#.zip and copy the file XBMC.exe into E:\T3CH\XBMC directory
• Go into the visualisations directory and keep only the _win32.vis files but delete the other *.vis files

What are the recent changes ?

All changes to the repository can be seen here http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_name=xbmc-svn

Note: branches/linuxport/XBMC/ is the repository for the Linux, MacOSX and Win32 port. trunk/ belongs to the xbox repository.

What is the best way to post logs ?

Take the xbmc.log out of the XBMC installation directory and upload it to http://pastebin.com/ for example. Post the link instead of the content.

How can I switch XBMC to full screen ?

Start XBMC.exe with -fs

What are platform directories ?

XBMC uses the UserDir in the installation directory to store profiles, settings and other stuff. You can start XBMC with -p to force it to use the directory Documents and Settings\[user]\AppData\XBMC on WinXp or Users/[user]/AppData/Roaming/XBMC on Vista.
On Linux and Mac other platform directories are used like the user HOME.

What is the current development platform ?

We currently develop under WindowsXP SP2 with Visual Studio 2003.

Why is my video screen smaller than my desktop in full screen ?

We're still early alpha. Try to set the xbmc video resolution to your current desktop resolution.