Jan52012
Switching to XBMC
Technology |
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I have run a computer connected to my TV for many years, started with just normal windows then Windows Media Center 2005, then Vista Media Center then to Boxee and now i’m making the move to XBMC.
I’ve spent a lot of time the last 3 days pimping out my XBMC Eden setup and organizing my movies and tv shows so they 100% identify and have all the poster, banner, logo and fanart images.
I’m pretty happy with XBMC its very customizable, but I do miss some of the features and apps Boxee had.
I made a video demo’ing my XBMC setup
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eepxM3K3tc
Here is a pic of my TV setup, my HTPC is a horizontal case under my receiver.
![[2012]](http://lh5.ggpht.com/-gNjv76cLWeI/TwE8eHeMmSE/AAAAAAABWYo/Ll_q1xYAFcQ/s64-c/2012.jpg "[2012]")
It doesn’t really have live tv. There is PVR functionality in beta, but you need to run another program in the background to communicate with your tv tuner and then you add a xbmc addon to communicate. USing something like mediaportal. I tried that but didnt work well. Plus I couldn’t get Canadian EPG guide data for ATSC.
So I have to run a program called zaptoxml in the background twice a day via a scheduled task which creates a xmltv.xml file for my channels based on my account on zap2it website.
I decided not bother with the beta PVR, didn’t wanna run extra crap in background and dont really need record. I have a network tuner the HDHomerun so you can access that without software in back. You just create .strm files that manual call the hdhomerun. I can just click these files in the file browser to launch but I kinda hacked an existing TV GUIDE plugin made for Swedish tv or something to read my xmltv.xml file and added one line of code to make it launch my .strm files when i click a channel (had to name the files the same as the channel name in guide).
So live TV no matter what route you go is not n00b friendly, heh.
I used the 3 versions of Windows Media Center for many years and have used mediabrowser and another plugin for TV… cant remember what its called, i actually bought it. But I think Boxee and XBMC doa much better job with downloaded tv and movie content. But the main thing I think is way better is the ability to add “apps” to get so much online streaming content.
But if you watch a lot of normal tv via cable or antenna, Windows Media Center with its excellent guide and PVR features might be a better choice.