Kodi

From Official Kodi Wiki
Revision as of 16:15, 26 July 2006 by 83.227.151.27 (talk)
Jump to navigation Jump to search
File:Xbmc.JPG
Default XBMC main menu (Project Mayhem 3 skin)
File:Xbmc666.jpg
XLink Kai, a free online gaming game-console tunneling service, is integrated into XBMC (MC360 skin)
File:Xbmc2.JPG
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 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. 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 whitout 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 appox 10-seconds to fully load. Also included in XBMC is international translations to many languages, (and if your language is not available then you can easily make your translation by simply editing an XML-file, plus by submitting that into the project you contribute to the experience of others who use the software). 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 practially be used to play/view all common multimedia formats 'straight-out of the box'. For a detailed list see the "Supported Formats" list in XBMC online-manual here.

On the video side, it uses two different muiltimedia (audio/video) player cores. (note that these handle the audio part of a video file also).

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 [[Dynamic_Link_Library|DLL]-files: RealMedia, QuickTime, WMV9/WMA9, VP4/5/6), and the sources are synced at regular intervals. Here's a list of supported formats.

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.

On the audio side, XBMC includes it's own in-house developed 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 also handles many picture/image formats with the options of panning/zooming and slideshows, with the use of CxImage. Supported formats are: BMP, JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, MNG, ICO, PCX and Targa.

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

de:Xbox Media Center fr:Xbox Media Center no:Xbox Media Center pl:Xbox Media Center fi:Xbox Media Center sv:Xbox Media Center

Retrieved from "https://kodi.wiki/index.php?title=Kodi&oldid=909"