XBMC Media Center Complete

I have completed my XBMC Media Center, and it works beautifully. The HDMI cable was inexpensive, and when I'm not using my laptop in the media center, I connect the cable to the Xbox. When starting up the Xbox, however, the speakers will make a 'pop' sound which didn't happen with the component cables connected. Perhaps Ben could enlighten me as to the cause of this.

Setting up your media folders in XBMC is self explanatory.

The interesting part came with the XBMC Remote app for Android. Installing it was quite simple, but it took me a bit to find the wiki page on how to set it up. So, go ahead and check out the easy-to-setup tutorial! The app connects via your home network and speaks to XBMC via HTTP.



The only problems I had using XBMC were some slight mouse lag (probably due to the weakness of my laptop), and frame rate drops from improper cooling. However, I went to the dollar store and picked up a $1 laptop stand that elevates the back end of the laptop to improve airflow and thus cooling. Problem solved for $1. Excellent.

The limits of my current set up are the hard drive space available for movie storage, and the fact that I use my laptop for many other things. So, setting up the media center requires moving tables, the power cord, etc. Although my setup is not dedicated, it is cheap and versatile. I love it.

Also check out the gallery to see the power of XBMC on your Android phone.

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.