Its nice to see it get some real publicity. I’m referring, of course, to the Xbox Media Center (XBMC) project, which I’ve written about before a few times. Its a open source linux project which allows you to turn your xbox into a swiss-army knife of media extenders, allowing you to play all kinds of media which might be stored elsewhere on your network (your PC, external drives) to play right on your TV.
Anyway, it got some major pub about a day ago when it hit Lifehacker, and subsequently got Dugg the hell out of.
Having said that, there are a couple things I do find somewhat annoying about the article (that got mentioned a few times by the commenters on said post):
1. it wasn’t invented yesterday: The tone of the article suggests that the XBMC was compiled for the first time a few days ago. This isn’t the case, and in fact has been around in some for or another for many, many years. I’ve had the pleasure of using it since ver 1.5 about two years ago. In fact, its been around for so long, a few guys have splintered off to start something called MediaPortal, which, as I understand it, is a PC like version of the XBMC. I’ve tried it and I like it — but the UI is no where as slick as the XBMC, and the community is probably 1/10th the size as well. Hence less themes, less plugins and so on.
2. it released the location of some illegal files: While the XBMC source code is freely available, to compile it you need the dev kit which costs money and *isn’t* free. In fact, the files that you end up after you compile aren’t technically legal either. The most reliable way to get an up to date version of XBMC is through IRC, but it usually isn’t published anywhere (usually casually referred to as “the usual place”), but if you dig around you’ll usually find it. Gina at Lifehacker happily published the IRC address on the post. Now, I’m not so naive as to think that the higher ups at Microsoft don’t already know the XBMC exists or where to get the bins for the XBMC. And that’s besides the fact that XBMC files can now also be found on your favourite Torrent sites as well.
Having said that, I also don’t think its *still* a wise idea to publish this kind of information (never mind on a huge site like Lifehacker), because all it will take is one bureaucratic minion *at* Microsoft with a “bright idea” to utterly ruin the XBMC with frivolous lawsuits and drive the whole thing even further underground.
I guess we’ll have to wait and see to see if something (if anything) comes out of this, as with this post the cat is well and truly out of the bag.
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As an addendum, one of the biggest limitations of the XBMC is its inability to play high definition codecs with ease. You get a tremendous amount of stuttering if there’s any playback at all with videos encoded in the popular h.264 format. The unfortunate thing is that as time rolls on, this is bound to get more popular. That’s why I will probably find myself upgrading to an xbox360 — which has solutions of its own to make it XBMC like — or, transforming my current PC into a partial home theatre PC, as it has the brute strength to play HD formats without breaking a sweat.
