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Revision as of 16:06, 10 February 2007 by >[email protected] (Reverted to revision 106787146 by Gamester17. TWINKLE)
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Template:Expand Template:Infobox Software2

Xbox Media Center (XBMC) is an award-winning media player for the Xbox game-console. The XBMC software is free, open source and its source code is distributed under the GNU General Public License. XBMC can display images and play music, videos and Xbox games from the Xbox's DVD drive, its internal hard drive, a local network, USB flash drive, and the internet. Other functions include displaying weather forecasts, displaying TV guides, watching Youtube and movie trailers from apple.com, listening to SHOUTcast and Podcasts streaming radio/video, also python-based mini-games, and a free online gaming alternative to Xbox Live.

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, or stream them over SMB/SAMBA/CIFS shares (Windows File-Sharing), ReplayTV DVRs, UPnP (Universal Plug and Play ) shares, XBMSP (Xbox Media Stream Protocol) shares, or stream iTunes-shares via DAAP. XBMC can also take advantage of the Xbox's Ethernet network port and a 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, it can stream Internet-video-streams, and play Internet-radio-stations (such as SHOUTcast). XBMC also includes the option to submit music usage statistics to Last.fm and a weather-forecast (via weather.com). It also has music/video-playlist features, picture/image-slideshow functions, an MP3+CDG karaoke function and many audio-visualizations and screensavers. XBMC can upconvert all 480p/576p standard-resolution videos and output them to 720p or 1080i HDTV-resolutions. In addition, XBMC has an integrated front-end for an Xbox Live alternative (called "XLink Kai"), a online gaming platform, enabling you to both control the Kai engine and play system-link/LAN-enabled Xbox games online, without connecting to the Xbox Live service, straight from your console.

Screenshots

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    Default XBMC main menu (Project Mayhem 3 skin)

  • Screenshot191.JPG

    XBMC browsing a user's music collection

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    XBMC's video browser

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    XBMC has the video to launch games from the hard drive

  • Screenshot192.JPG

    XBMC displaying weather information

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    By using XBMC, one can enable mods on their games

Awards

XBMC won two categories SourceForge 2006 Community Choice Awards, for Best Multimedia Project and Best Game Project. Winners were announced at the Slashdot Lounge at LinuxWorld Expo, Boston, April 5, 2006.

Running XBMC

At present, the latest 'stable' version of XBMC is 2.0.1 final point-release (released on the 12 November, 2006), however because XBMC is an open source software program, it constantly undergoes minor to major changes on a daily basis (sometimes noted by the tags "SVN" or "CVS"), with new features, functions and bug-fixes. XBMC's developers provide a public SVN, but SVN builds can be a little unstable sometimes. Before XBMC's developers switched to SVN for source code development, CVS was used.

The XBMC executable, where available, is typically of unknown provenance. (See the legality section below.)

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, or not up-to-date, 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). Currently the existing supported languages are; Brazilian Portuguese, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Maltese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovene, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish.

XBMC features a Python Scripts Engine in a similar fashion to Apple Mac OS X Dashboard Widgets and Microsoft Gadgets in Windows Sidebar, 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 plugin scripts include functions like Internet-TV and movie-trailer browsers, cinema and weather guides, TV-guides (EPG), e-mail clients, messaging, train-timetables, scripts to front-end control PVR software and hardware (like: MediaPortal, MythTV, TiVo, ReplayTV, Dreambox/DBox2), Internet-radio-station browsers (example SHOUTcast, Xm radio, Sirius Satellite Radio), P2P file-sharing downloaders (BitTorrent), IRC, also party and casual games (a.k.a. mini-games) such as Tetris, Snake, Space Invaders and Sudoku, and much more.

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 optionally 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.

Supported formats/codecs:

Video playback:

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 ones with the help of proprietary DLL-files: RealMedia/RealVideo/RealAudio, QuickTime, WMV9/WMA9, VP4/VP5/VP6), and the sources are synced at regular intervals.

The second core for video-playback is an in-house developed DVD-player for DVD-Video movies, including the support of DVD-menus, (based on the open source libraries code libdvdcss 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 code libraries, libmpeg2, libdca/libdts, and liba52/libac3 respectively). One relatively unusual feature of this DVD-player core is the capability to on-the-fly parse and play DVD-Video movies that are stored in ISO and IMG DVD-images, DVD-Video movies that are stored as DVD-Video (IFO/VOB/BUP) files on a harddrive or network-share, and also ISO and IMG DVD-images directly from RAR and ZIP archives. In addition this DVD-player core can upscale/upconvert all DVD-Video movies and output them to 720p or 1080i HDTV resolutions in better quality than most (if not all) high-definition television sets own native function to upscale/upconvert video.

Audio playback:

For audio playback, XBMC includes its own in-house developed audio-player: PAPlayer (Psycho-Acoustic Audio Player). Some of this audio-player core's most notable features are on-the-fly resampling to the Xbox's native audio frequency (48 kHz), gapless playback, crossfading, Replay Gain, cue sheet and Ogg Chapter support. It handles a very large variety of sound files/formats: MP2, MP3, Vorbis, MPC, AAC, AACplus (AAC+), APE, FLAC, WavPack, 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.

Digital picture/image display:

XBMC handles all common digital picture/image formats with the options of panning/zooming and slideshows with "Ken Burns Effect", with the use of CxImage source code library. 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 not currently play any audio/video files protected/encrypted with DRM (Digital Rights Management), such as music purchased from ITunes Music Store, MSN Music or Audible.com. Workaround: First remove any DRM protection/encryption from the song or video with a third-party program before you try to play it, e.g: hymn, FreeMe, Unfuck, FairUse4WM, DRM2WMV or DRMDBG).
  • UDF (Universal Disk Format) file-system limitation: XBMC only support UDF version 1.02 (designed for DVD-Video media), which has a maximum file-size of 1GB (meaning if you burn a DVD-media in a newer UDF version with a video that is larger than 1GB, 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 most common standard for recording CD/DVDs. Unfortunately ISO 9660 has a 2GB file-size limitation, which cannot be bypassed.
  • The Xbox built-in harddrive is formatted 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 ASCII characters in file/folder names (like for example < > = ? : ; " * + , / \|¤ &). XBMC will automatically 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 733 MHz Intel Pentium III Celeron 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). 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 733 MHz Intel Pentium III Celeron 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) encoded 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 720x576 pixels video-resolution. It is best to encode your videos to MPEG-4 ASP (like DivX or XviD) instead, as then that video's native-resolution can be anything up to 960x540 pixels (a.k.a. HRHD resolution).

Legality

Although the XBMC software for the Xbox game-console is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL), it is written for compilation with the proprietary Microsoft XDK (Xbox Development Kit) which is only available for purchase by official Microsoft game-publishers. Any XBMC executable that is compiled by unknown parties will therefore be of unknown legal provenance. XBMC's full source code is however legal 'as is' and is available from the XBMC public SVN repository on SourceForge.

Also, even though most video and audio codecs are supported natively through the libavcodec library from the FFmpeg project. For those codecs where no open source audio/video decoder has been implemented yet the MPlayer-based playback core in XBMC relies on binary codecs, using Windows DLLs directly with the help of a DLL loader forked from avifile (which itself forked its loader from the Wine project).

The combination of CSS decryption library for retail DVD-Video playback and implementation of codecs covered by software patents places a fully-functional XBMC (with the MPlayer-based playback core that XBMC uses) in the legal bind shared by most open source free software multimedia players.

See also

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External links

Official sites

Modifications

Articles & Reviews

Support

News





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