XBMC Media Center has an interesting history, as it originates from the Microsoft Xbox game console - thus the name XBMC (Xbox Media Center). It has a long history as the project goes back to as far as the year 2002. XBMC can be considered as one of the killer applications for the original Xbox as it managed to expand the game console into a full blown media center that could playback Divx/AVI video, MP3s and just about any media content of that time. As time passed on and the original Xbox became a legacy product, the project was steered to new paths: They began porting it to GNU/Linux, Max OSX and Windows. As a result their next major release is now at Beta 2 stage, and available for all supported platforms, and believe me that it is a beauty.

The features of XBMC are nothing short of impressive. It can playback virtually anything you throw at it. It boasts a full selection of codecs out of the box and is expandable via a plugin architechture.

XBMC can play most audio and video file formats as well as display images at resolutions up to 1080p and over from virtually any source, including your local hard drive, CD/DVDs, USB flash drives, the Internet, and network shares, upscaling any lower resolutions videos to the maximum of your displays capability. XBMC can also playback DVD-Video movies with menus from ISO/IMG-images on-the-fly, even when they are in an RAR or ZIP archive. For music playback XBMC offers gapless playback, crossfading, cue sheet, replay gain amplification, advanced smart playlists, and chapter support.

XBMC can download or stream Internet video and audio streams, and play Internet radio stations (such as Podcasts and SHOUTcast), and listen to your favorites and discover new music with free, streaming music from Last.fm, among others.

XBMC of course handles all common digital picture formats with the options of panning/zooming, and slideshow with “Ken Burns Effect“. XBMC also handles CBZ and CBR comic book archive files, this feature lets you view/read, browse and zoom the pictures of comics pages these contain without uncompressing them first.

I did a quick test run with the Beta 2 for Windows, and it really seems to deliver. The user interface is quite well thought, and works nicely by just using a mouse. High Definition .MKV files were playing as expected, with Matroska embedded subtitles. In terms of memory usage the didn’t seem like a resource hog either.

I can highly recommend anyone to check our XBMC for a HTPC project, or just out of general interest. I would find it especially interesting for people with laptops, with a possibility to connect it to a big screen TV or a projector, as XBMC can run as a stand alone application in your PC so the installation and configuration is a snap.

Download from: xbmc.org