XBMC First Try

I'm attempting to make a media center powered by Android, XBMC, and a value laptop. Although it's not complete yet, I want to share the outline of the project. The scale of the project is quite small. I don't want to record live TV like a DVR, or even watch live TV. I simply want to stream content from a PC to my TV. One thing I've learned from Netflix over the years is that streaming content straight to a TV is far more convenient than having to sort through DVDs.

So here are some details.

1. Being a college student gets you Amazon Prime for a year for free, which means free 2-day shipping, an $80 value. This is great for picking up a few components quickly, such as the High Speed HDMI cable I bought for $7. This will be used to connect the laptop to the HDTV, and when the media center is not in use, it will replace the component cables on the Xbox 360.

2. I'm going to try XBMC as my media center software. I have it installed on my computer right now. My only first impressions so far are that the software runs very quickly and smoothly. This outright makes it better than Windows Media Center.

3. XBMC also has an XBMC Remote app for Android. I'm quite anxious to see how well this works in a few days. It has 4.5 of 5 stars on the Android Marketplace, so I suspect it works well.

That's it for now. I'll put it all together when the HDMI cables arrives and give an update on the project.

Should everything go smoothly, I'll look into an Ubuntu based media center so that Mabuntu will have a new purpose.