Kodi

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Default XBMC main menu (Project Mayhem 3 skin)

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XLink Kai, a free online gaming game-console tunneling service, is integrated into XBMC (MC360 skin)

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XBMC displaying a music collection (MC360 skin)

Xbox Media Center (XBMC) is a feature-rich open source media player for the Xbox -- a software program which plays video, music and displays pictures/images from the Xbox DVD-ROM drive, built-in harddisk drive, local-area-network or the Internet.

XBMC is the successor to Xbox Media Player (XBMP) (XBMP). XBMC is a complete rewrite of XBMP by the same developer-team. XBMC was publicly announced in October 2003.

Features

XBMC can play media from CD/DVD media using the Xbox's built-in DVD-ROM drive. It can also play media from the Xbox's built-in harddisk-drive, stream it over an SMB/SAMBA/CIFS share (Windows File-Sharing), Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) share, XBMSP (XBox Media Stream Protocol) share, or stream iTunes-shares via DAAP. XBMC takes advantage of the Xbox ethernet-network-port and broadband Internet connection if available, using the IMDb to obtain thumbnails and reviews on movies, CDDB (via FreeDB) for Audio-CD track-listings) and album-thumbnails via AMG, stream Internet-video-streams, and play Internet-radio-stations (such as SHOUTcast). XBMC also includes the option to submit music usage statistics to Audioscrobbler and Last.fm, it has music/video-playlist and picture/image-slideshow functions, a weather-forecast (via Weather.com) and MP3+CDG karaoke function, plus many audio-visualizations. XBMC can also upconvert all 480p/576p standard-resolution videos and output them to 720p or 1080i HDTV-resolutions. In addition is a frontend for an Xbox Live alternative (called "XLink Kai") integrated, enabling you to control the engine running separately and play system-link/LAN-enabled Xbox games online without leaving your television.

Running XBMC

XBMC requires a modchip or software exploit/hack to run, as it is not an authorized (a.k.a. "signed") Microsoft product. XBMC can be run as an application, or a dashboard that appears directly when the Xbox is turned on, it takes approximately ten seconds to fully load. XBMC also includes support for many different languages (if your language is not available then you can easily make your translation by editing an XML-file, which can be submitted to the project's database for use by others). In addition, because XBMC is an open source software program, it constantly undergoes minor to major changes on a daily basis (sometimes noted by the tags "CVS").

XBMC supports Python scripts as Widget plugins, so users can add new functionality to XBMC (using the Python programming language) without an illegal copy of the XDK and without knowledge of the C/C++ programming language. Current scripts include functions like Internet-TV and movie-trailer browsers, cinema and weather guides, e-mail clients, messaging, train-timetables, scripts to front-end control PVR software and hardware (like: MediaPortal, MythTV, TiVo, ReplayTV, Dreambox), Internet-radio-station browsers (example SHOUTcast, Xm radio, Sirius Satellite Radio), P2P file-sharing downloaders (BitTorrent), IRC, and mini-games such as Space Invaders and Sudoku, and much more.

At present, XBMC is in a "feature freeze" cycle, which means that the developers are concentrating on fixing bugs and only adding features that concern them. The result will be a stable point release, 2.0.0.

Format support

XBMC can be used to play/view all common multimedia formats 'straight out of the box'. It can decode these in software and optionaly pass-through AC3/DTS audio from video to S/PDIF output to an external audio-receiver/amplifier. For a detailed up-to-date list see the "Supported Formats" list in XBMC online-manual here. Currently the supported formats/codecs include:

• Container formats: AVI, MPEG/MPG, WMV, ASF, FLV, MKV, MOV, MP4, M4A, AAC, NUT, OGG, OGM, RealMedia RAM/RM/RV/RA/RMVB, 3gp, VIVO, PVA, NUV, NSV, NSA, FLI, FLC
• Video codecs: MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, XviD, 3ivx, DV, H.263, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, HuffYUV, Indeo, MJPEG, RealVideo, QuickTime, Sorenson, Theora, WMV, Cinepak,
• Audio codecs: WAV/WAVE, MP2, MP3, AAC, AACplus, WMA, AC3, DTS, ALAC, AMR, FLAC, APE (Monkey's Audio), RealAudio, SHN, WavPack, MPC (Musepack, a.k.a. Mpeg+), Speex, Vorbis and WMA.
• Picture/image formats: BMP, JPEG/JPG, GIF, PNG, TIF/TIFF, MNG, ICO, PCX and Targa/TGA

XBMC uses two different multimedia player cores for video playback:

The first is a ported version of the open source cross-platform player, MPlayer, which is known for playing proprietary media-formats without having to pay license fees. XBMC handles all codecs and containers normally supported by MPlayer (all FFmpeg supported codecs and also several external one with the help of proprietary DLL-files: RealMedia, QuickTime, WMV9/WMA9, VP4/5/6), and the sources are synced at regular intervals.

The second is a in-house developed DVD-player for DVD-Video movies, including the support of DVD-menus, (based on the open source libraries libcss and libdvdnav). This core support all the FFmpeg codecs, and in addition the MPEG-2 video codec, and the audio codecs DTS and AC3 (based on the open source libraries, libmpeg2, libdca, and liba52 respectivly). One relativly unusual feature of this DVD-player core is the capability to parse and play DVD-Video movies that are stored in ISO and IMG DVD-images, and DVD-Video movies that are stored as DVD-Video files (IFO/VOB) on a harddrive or network-share, and also images in RAR and ZIP archives. In addition the DVD-player core can upconvert all DVD-Video movies and output them to 720p or 1080i HDTV resolutions in better quality than most (if not all) HDTV's native function to upconvert video.

For audio playback, XBMC includes its own in-house developed audio-player: PAPlayer (Psycho-acoustic Audio Player). Some of this cores most notable features are resampling to the Xbox's native audio frequency (48 kHz), Gapless playback, crossfading, ReplayGain, Cue Sheet and Ogg Chapter support. It handles a very large variety of sound files: MP2, MP3, OGG (Vorbis), MPC, LC-AAC, AAC+, APE, FLAC, WavPack, SHN (Shorten), WAV, DTS, AC3, CDDA, WMA, IT, S3M, MOD (Amiga Module), XM, NSF (NES Sound Format), SPC (SNES), GYM (Genesis), SID (Commodore 64), Adlib, YM (Atari ST), ADPCM (GameCube). It also supports many different tagging standards: APEv1, APEv2, ID3v1, ID3v2, ID666 and Vorbis Comments.

XBMC handles digital picture/image formats with the options of panning/zooming and slideshows, with the use of CxImage. XBMC can also handle CBZ (ZIP) and CBR (RAR) comic book archive files, this feature lets you view/read, browse and zoom the pictures these contain without uncompressing them first.

Limitations

• XBMC can currently not play any audio/video files protected/encrypted with Digital Rights Management (DRM), such as music purchased from ITunes Music Store, MSN Music or Audible.com. Workaround: Removed that DRM protection/encryption with some third-party software before you try to play it, like: hymn, FreeMe, Unfuck, DRM2WMV or DRMDBG).
• Universal Disk Format (UDF) file-system limitation: XBMC only support UDF version 1.02 (designed for DVD-Video media), which has a maximum file of 1GB (meaning if you burn a DVD-media in a newer UDF version with a video that is larger than 1GB then XBMC will not be able to play that file), same goes for UDF/ISO hybrid formats (a.k.a. UDF Bridge format). Workaround: Burn all your CD/DVD-media in ISO 9660 format which is the largest is standard anyway, (though ISO 9660 has a 2GB file-size limitation that there is no workaround for).
• The Xbox built-in harddrive is formated in FATX which has a 4GB file-size limitation, and only supports file/folder-names up to 42 characters, a maximum of 255 in total file-structure character-depth and a maximum number of 4096 files/folders in a single subfolder, plus in the root of each partition the maximum number of files/folders is 256. FAT does not either support all ACSII characters in file/folder names (like for example < > = ? : ; " * + , / \ | ¤ &). XBMC will automaticly rename any files/folders you transfer to the Xbox by these limitations. (None of these are XBMC issues that can be fixed as the limitation is in the Xbox itself). Workaround: Store your files/folders on your computer or a Network-Attached Storage (NAS) device/box and share them over a local-area-network instead.
• With its 733Mhz Intel Pentium III and 64MB shared memory, the Xbox does not have enough hardware-resources (not fast enough CPU nor large enough RAM-memory) to play 720p/1080i resolution-native HDTV video (at 1280x720 and 1920x1080 pixels), (like WMV HD). Workaround: XBMC can however upconvert all 480p/576p standard-resolution movies and output them to 720p or 1080i HDTV resolutions in better quality than most (if not all) HDTV's native function to upconvert video.
• Again with its 733Mhz Intel Pentium III and 64MB shared memory, the Xbox does not have enough hardware-resources (not fast enough CPU nor large enough RAM-memory) to play MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) encododed videos with Cabac and Deblocking if the video-resolution is higher than 352x288 pixels. Workaround: If you encode your MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) videos without Cabac and Deblocking then the Xbox hardware can handle up to 480x576 pixels video-resolution. Though best is to encode your videos to MPEG-4 ASP (like DivX or XviD) instead, then the videos native-resolution can be up to 960x540 pixels (a.k.a. HRHD resolution).

Legality

Although XBMC is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL), it is written for use with Microsoft's XDK and so is not legally available as an executable program to non-official Microsoft game-publishers. Users are encouraged to compile their own binaries from the public CVS repository using the XDK, rather than downloading a questionable illegally released executable. XBMC's full source code is however legal 'as is' and is available on SourceForge.

External links

• XboxMediaCenter (XBMC) official website
• XboxMediaCenter (XBMC) official mirror-site
• XboxMediaCenter (XBMC) official community forums
• XboxMediaCenter (XBMC) 'new' official online-manual (wiki-based)
• XboxMediaCenter (XBMC) 'old' official online-manual (wiki-based)
• XboxMediaCenter (XBMC) official SourceForge.net project (CVS/source-code/patches//tools/bug-tracker/feature-requests)
• XBMC community forums @ xbox-scene.com (unofficial but affilated by shared moderators)
• What's Up With XBMC (unofficial)
• XBMC Plugin Scripts
• XBMC chat room (IRC)
• XBMC skin download site
• another XBMC skinning site
• Review on tomshardware.com
• Review on tvharmony.com
• Review in Hardcore Gamer Magazine (Volume 1, Issue 3, August 2005)
• Transform an Xbox into the ultimate media center - A step-by-step guide how to softmod your Xbox on ProductWiki
• How to use a Mac to setup XBMC