HTPC now makes sense.....

[dave87]

Well, I'll admit that I'm behind the times, but I reinstalled my HTPC yesterday, and for the first time installed XBMC on windows, and I'm a complete convert. XBMC just makes sense on a HTPC. Welcome to the 21st Century and all that.

I've so far set up my (to date unused) PS3 Bluetooth remote to control it, and it works pretty much perfectly. Now all I need to do is set XBMC to run at startup.

So as I've got some catching up to do, what are the recommended additions/changes? Or am I completely wrong and I should be using something else?


P.S. Moving back to a machine which has a normal hard drive to boot from is painful....I'd forgotten how much of a difference an SSD makes....

[virtuo]

Out of the alternatives, XBMC is brilliant. I've never run it on a Windows HTPC though, so haven't checked all of the competition (not that I'd really want to). I do think the plugin/addon features are a bit confusing/limited, but it works so well out of the box, you don't really need many addons.


If you run a lot of emulators on your HTPC, then hyperspin-fe looks great as well - such a shame it's windows only.

[sam3]

Plex is awesome if you want to stream media to more than 1 client.

I currently have plex media server installed on my nas (HP n54l) and have it streaming media to my htpc, laptops, ipads and android devices. The plex media center (for windows/osx) is built off of xmbc so has lots of the same features but has a different ui/skin (I actually prefer the ui in plex rather than xmbc).

It can also transcode video files on the fly if your device doesn't support a certain codec etc.

[jim]

I still find it a bit clunky to programme, personally - I love the software, but building all of the libraries and making everything look nice seems like a lifetime's work.

[Skinleech]

I used to love XBMC when I had a softmodded Xbox, ripped all my CDs to the 750gb drive in installed in it & it was great as a jukebox, plus easy to navigate when I wanted to stream videos from the PC or internal drive.

On the PC I just don't like it. Something about it just doesn't work for me. I use Media Portal with the StreamedMP plugin instead, I much prefer the interface for that.