My girlfriend of 7.5 years and I have recently gotten engaged. A result of this, the computer I gave her (my old PC) is now useless, or at least it serves no immediate use. Then one day I came across a posting on Lifehacker talking about the latest release of XBMC. Now, XBMC is a media center. I won’t go into a lot of detail but you can think of it as a suped up Windows Media Center that can play any file and not just those supported natively by Windows Media Player.

What I’m loving about XBMC is its ability to use “Scrapers” to grab the files in the directories you tell it to look in, and automagically download posters, information, runtime, etc. I especially love its ability to download the specific TV episode information. You can see that in the below screenshot which shows the TV Show House with a description of what the show’s about, etc.

I’ve spent the last few weeks testing out XBMC on my laptop. Customizing images, etc. I love it. But it took some time for me since I’m not a super-geek (I like to think of myself as more of a nerd), and their “online manual” isn’t completely up to date and isn’t as explicit as it could be. Here are some of the hang-ups I had and how you might be able to avoid them.

My first hang up was getting XBMC to recognize my files so that the information could be downloaded from their “scrapers”. Through their documentation I found that there were naming conventions for the files and ways to add custom naming. I was unable to get the custom naming to work properly so I felt I was out of luck and was going to have to manually change every single episodes filename. Luckily I came across another Lifehacker article describing a utility called Ant Renamer which can bulk change filenames. Problem solved.

Here’s an example of what my filenames looked like before (I used this convention for easier browsing with my Xbox 360):

\Videos\TV Shows\House\Season 5\House 5.01 Dying Changes Everything.avi

Here’s an example of what I changed it to so that XBMC will automatically recognize the file:

\Videos\TV Shows\House\Season 5\House.s05e01 Dying Changes Everything.avi

Ant Renamer made this process very easy by simply using a string replacement.

My next hang-up came with using custom art for Movie posters. The documentation on the website was not entirely clear (at least to me on my first read) where to store the file and how to actually get it to show up since the program automatically downloads a poster for you. The online manual said to delete the thumbnail cache in the Userdata folder. I had prior knowledge of where the Userdata folder was from trying to use custom filenames. I went to the folder but could not find the thumbnail cache folder. That’s because it turns out there are 2 Userdata folders in my Vista installation and it took me a while to find the second. It was hidden away in my \AppData\Roaming folder (or something like that, I’ll have to verify). Regardless, after finding the folder, deleting the cache, putting the Thumbnails into the movie folder and renaming the extension from .jpg to .tbn, the posters finally showed up. Success.

I had one other major problem which I wasn’t necessarily too worried about since this was just my testing phase. Resolution. There are 2 versions of XBMC that were installed. One was the normal fullscreen version, and one was the “Windowed” mode. After opening XBMC in windowed mode once, whenever I opened it in fullscreen afterwards I couldn’t get it to use the screen’s resolution. Rather it used a very low resolution and made everything look terrible at fullscreen. After searching and searching for a resolution (admittedly finding it and not realizing I had) I asked on their forums and got a quick reply.

System > Appearance > Screen > Resolution

This just wasn’t readily apparent to me as there are no dropdown menus in XBMC and instead you must scroll through all the options.

All in all the experience has been one of amazement. I have gone ahead and installed Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex on the old PC and will install the Linux version of XBMC tonight. I also plan to test out Boxee which is an offshoot of XBMC (as XBMC is open-source) with social networking features. I hope to report back to you on that in the near future.

Me-D-Uh - Tags: boxee, htpc, ubuntu, xbmc