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Television Media Software XBox (Games)

XBMC 'Atlantis' Beta 1 Released, Now Cross-Platform 169

Posted by timothy from the let-a-thousand-flowers-bloom dept.
An anonymous reader writes with a welcome followup to last year's promise of XBMC being made available for Linux: "The first cross-platform Beta version[s] of XBMC Media Center for Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, and Xbox have now been released in preparation for an upcoming stable release, code named 'Atlantis.'" Now, though, there are binaries available for download through the XBMC Media Center site, though only for the non-Xbox versions.
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XBMC 'Atlantis' Beta 1 Released, Now Cross-Platform More

XBMC 'Atlantis' Beta 1 Released, Now Cross-Platform

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  • I love xbmc. Anyone knows of a nice (and cheap) pc that could serve as a media center with xbmc, a la asus eee box, but with the ability to run hdtv content?

    • The eee box, or msi wind desktop will run xbmc with 720p content, just not 1080p.... just an FYI.. When the dual core atoms ship out, I would expect them to be able to handle 1080p in cpu. Alternatively, you could setup an intel core 2 based itx system from logicsupply.com ... With even a moderate Pentium Dual core cpu (based on core 2, not original Pentium D), or a laptop cpu, you should be able to do a decent media system for under $500US.
    • You might look at 3btech, they have some cute smallish barebones core duo/nvidia and phenom systems with DVI outputs. Stuff has been banging someplace between $100 and $200. You can probably get away with as little as 128MB RAM, I'd probably use about 512MB minimum (but honestly, I suspect that is enough.) Add a USB stick for booting. you can get an 8GB for about $20 if you look around. If I had HD I'd go this route today; at SD resolutions (my highest-res large output device is an XGA DLP front projector)

  • XBMCMC? (Score:2, Informative)

    by Thelasko ( 1196535 )

    The first cross-platform Beta version[s] of XBMC Media Center for Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, and Xbox have now been released in preparation for an upcoming stable release, code named 'Atlantis

    Xbox Media Center Media Center? I'm sorry, but when I see XMBC I think Xbox Media Center in my mind. Its use isn't ubiquitous enough that people have forgotten what it stands for.

  • xbmc rocks (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pak9rabid ( 1011935 ) on Thursday September 18, 2008 @03:37PM (#25060139)
    XBMC is the only reason I own an XBox. It's simply an amazing piece of software. I definitely look forward to trying it out on my Linux box...What would be really amazing would be XBMC for the 360 so that we could get true HD support.

    • Re:xbmc rocks (Score:4, Informative)

      by neo8750 ( 566137 ) <zepski.zepski@net> on Thursday September 18, 2008 @03:49PM (#25060345) Homepage
      If you run mythtv you can use XBMc to communcate with it to watch live channels and recorded shows. add the source myth://Comp-name/

      I run this on my linux box that i use for my htpc. I like it because it can handle anything i throw at it even HD content (something the orginal xbox couldnt handle) Also i think it looks 1000000x beter then mythtv gui

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Moryath ( 553296 )

        That's presuming you can get MythTV to work properly, a dicey proposition at best.

        I've had FAR more luck getting XBMC to talk correctly to pre-recorded media (of almost any format) from my NAS and winboxen.

        As for the GUI... I love the XBMC GUI. I love the fact that the Xboxes I purchased at a flea market for comparative pennies make lovely network video boxes for the spare rooms in my house to pull just about everything I've recorded from NAS.

        I'm looking forward to the "new" Windows-based XBMC so my home th

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by neo8750 ( 566137 )
          I've only had 1 problem getting mythtv to work properly with my mythtv setup and that was using an actual xbox. I could view pre-recorded shows but not live tv. It was strange since it was same build as the other xbox i had been using.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by pak9rabid ( 1011935 )
        I actually had that setup a few years ago. I had my server which ran mythtv-backend, then the XBox was the frontend via the XBMC MythTV plugin. It was simply amazing. Coupled with MythWeb, there's nothing like it. I would schedule my recordings from work via MythWeb and have a nice list of stuff to watch when I got home :).

    • Agreed, it's the center of my media center at home. I just wish the Xbox could handle 720p, but not a big deal for me right now.

      The interface is top notch, my wife can navigate with ease, of course, we have a remote to interact with it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by marcop ( 205587 )

      Bill Gates was shown a demo of XMBC and asked how Microsoft could engage the community. Why don't they come out and support it on the 360? I might consider buying one if it did.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by ConceptJunkie ( 24823 )

        Microsoft doesn't care about engaging the community as long as they can imprison the community.

        It's a shame too, because there are lots of ways that they could embrace "freedom" that would win them lots of favor with the very customers they've spent all these years alienating. They could do lots of things like this, but they'd rather try to succeed with a stick than a carrot.

        Maybe after the guy with too many Y-chromosomes steps down Microsoft can go back to being part of the community rather than trying to

    • You need +15 modding >:(

      So so pissed off that Sony blocked XBMC on linux with the PS3 (they closed the GPU loophole)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Samah ( 729132 )
      I love XBMC so much I own FOUR Xboxes (one for each room with a TV). Hooked up to my Linux server with about 6 terabytes worth of TV/movies/etc., it's pretty awesome. ;)

  • The Killer App (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ahoehn ( 301327 ) <andrew AT hoe DOT hn> on Thursday September 18, 2008 @03:40PM (#25060187) Homepage

    XBMC really was the killer app for a modded 1st gen XBOX. I dropped a 120GB hard drive in mine, had it auto-sync with my video torrent folder, and had a brilliant little movie/tv show playing setup going on. It makes an Xbox do what Microsoft should have done with its Media Center Extender initiative.

    For something that was quasi-legal (if I remember you needed proprietary things from the Xbox developer's SDK to properly compile the source for the Xbox) it had a remarkably excellent UI. Things seemed to work quite well. It seems like a good thing to have some real competition in the media center market, particularly cross-platform open-source competition.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Hatta ( 162192 )

      I still watch nearly all my TV on my xbox. TVRSS with rtorrent, samba, and XBMC has made broadcast TV obsolete.

      • I still watch nearly all my TV on my xbox. TVRSS with rtorrent, samba, and XBMC has made broadcast TV obsolete.

        A bit noisy, no? Or was the 1st gen Xbox quieter than today's? I achieve the same Az+RSS+Winshares+Samba coverage of old and new TV with a diskless NFS header running mythtv on a mini-ITX board. Didn't bother with broadcast TV but like you say, with BT coverage you don't miss out.

      • What do you use to get the feeds? I currently use pytvshows. It works great, but I wasn't sure if there were any others out there. (There is TVShows.app for OSX, but development has stalled).

    • I'm still using it. 100Mbps ethernet means more than enough bandwidth to stream a DVD. I rip both to linux/samba and to windows xp and then play them via SMB which the Xbox does inherently. Amusingly XP is not up to the task of streaming a non-transcoded DVD and doing anything else intense at the same time. Linux, of course, no problem. You can also FTP things to a local cache, or use a cute little xbmsp streaming server (windows, linux, java, etc) to play from whatever. The GUI is pixel shader-based so it

  • XBMC is spelled "XBMC", (not "XMBC") (Score:3, Informative)

    by Cyberace1 ( 677393 ) on Thursday September 18, 2008 @03:49PM (#25060355)
    Someone got dyslexia ;P as it is "XBMC", not "XMBC". XBMC (formerly "XBox Media Center") is now a recursive acronym for "XBMC Media Center" more information on the official website http://xbmc.org/about/ [xbmc.org]

  • Plex (Score:2, Informative)

    by AgentUSA ( 251620 )
    Mac users should also look at Plex [plexapp.com]. It's a very nice fork by the former XMBC for Mac/OSXBMC team.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Cyberace1 ( 677393 )
      Plex is not made by "the former XBMC for Mac team", only one guy from Team-XBMC left the XBMC project to start Plex, all other developers stayed with the original XBMC project. XBMC has all the features and functions of Plex and all skins that work in Plex where designed for XBMC and thus just as good if not better in XBMC, (Plex have not made any changes to the skinning engine, however Team-XBMC have updated the skinning engine in XBMC since Plex forked its code from XBMC). Plex is only a software fork o

      • Re:Plex (Score:4, Funny)

        by Michael Hunt ( 585391 ) on Thursday September 18, 2008 @10:12PM (#25065481) Homepage
        I'd be likely to take you more seriously if you could spell Elan Feingold's name correctly.

  • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      untrue, Linux source is available. Any proper /.'er should have no issues compiling themselves ;-) Binaries only for Ubuntu at the moment as that is the target/dev environment.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by BLKMGK ( 34057 )

      Actually it runs on several distros but Ubuntu is the one they are working towards supporting. Atlantis is being done as an ISO for a bootable CD anyway so really who cares what the underlying OS is exactly? If you're going to do a dedicated HTPC you might as well run the supported OS anyway IMO

  • DVR? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by edmicman ( 830206 ) on Thursday September 18, 2008 @04:07PM (#25060673) Homepage Journal
    How can I, or what are my options for, integrating XBMC into a DVR setup?

    I used to use MythTV but hated the interface; that combined with the free TV guides going away made me try out MCE 2005, which I currently run.

    MCE2005 works, the interface is great (for PVR stuff at least...I don't really like the music manager, though), but the management is crap compared to MythTV. I can't remote onto it easily because it's XP-based, and the web management is garbage, too. I've been thinking of trying out something else, or seeing how MythTV is now.

    Basically my setup is this: I have a FreeNAS that I use for file sharing that I have my music and downloaded videos on. I have the MCE box in the living room doing DVR stuff, with connections to the file shares for music and the rest of the videos. And I an original Xbox sitting around doing nothing.

    I'd love to be able to put the DVR somewhere out of the way, have it do it's thing, and pump everything to XBMC somewhere. But can you do the live-tv thing with XBMC? Maybe I'm missing some other package out there completely?

    • I used to use MythTV but hated the interface;

      Can't blame you there, it is... rough. But it is immensely capable, so I've learned to live with it's rough edges in exchange for the incredible power it provides (and being a programmer, I can't help but love being able to write custom SQL recording rules :).

      that combined with the free TV guides going away

      You chose a closed solution with little flexibility over paying $20 *per year* for guide data [schedulesdirect.org]? Really? Meh, to each his/her own, I guess.

      Fortunately, you ca

      • You chose a closed solution with little flexibility over paying $20 *per year* for guide data [schedulesdirect.org]? Really? Meh, to each his/her own, I guess.

        Mostly it was I got it for free from work, and had grown frustrated with MythTV. I'm thinking of looking back into it, and granted the schedule thing isn't that big of a deal :-)

        Fortunately, you can hook XBMC into MythTV. Wouldn't that be a solution for you?

        I guess that's what I wasn't sure of. So XBMC can run on an xbox and hook into MythTV? Or does XBMC need to be running on an actual computer (possibly even the same MythTV box?) to actually be able to use the DVR things that MythTV does? Hmmmm...I'll have to look into this - thanks!

        • The model would be that XBMC would run on an Xbox, and it would connect to Myth over the network just like another frontend.

          Incidentally, from what I can tell, XBMC now has a basic, native MythTV client built in. It can be used to watch and delete recordings, and watch and record live TV. However, it has no EPG support, no commercials skip, etc. See here:

          http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/326091 [gossamer-threads.com]

          Looks like an interesting option.

  • I want to stream music and video (but I'd settle for just music) to my Wii. I don't want to hack it, so my best bet is probably coming up with a web application to view with Opera on the Wii. I played with Jinzora for a while but never could the Wii part of it to work; I never could figure out how to start the Flash player that was supposed to handle everything.

    So, dear Slashdotters, have any of you managed to play music or other media on a Wii from a Unix sever?

    • Someone has ported XBMC partially to the Wii. Problem is he won't release his code or his binaries. A very few people have them and say it works great (for alpha).

      If you can code donate some time to the XBMC group and get it working.

    • I haven't tried it recently but Sockso [pu-gh.com] seemed to work fairly well as I recall. Music only and only MP3s at that but apparently the latest version(s) offer on-the-fly MP3 conversion.
    • Orb does this. You run the Orb server on your PC, and then you pull up a flash app on the Wii Web Browser that allows you to stream both video and audio to the Wii.

  • I've been really wanting to get XBMC on my PS3. I have it on my original XBox, but is struggled with HD at times depending on the codec because it lacked memory. The XBox also can't put out 1080p.

    I'm wondering if I should attempt to install Linux on my PS3, and then compile XBMC on it. Will I have issues because of the non-x86 architecture?

    If I have Linux on my PS3, will it still play PS3 games? I think I need to hit up Wikipedia and start reading.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Enderandrew ( 866215 )

      Yes, you can do multiple partitions and keep the PS3 OS (and thusly play PS3 games) as well as a separate Linux partition.

      Now I just need to know if I can compile XBMC on the Cell/PPC architecture.

      • Yes, you can do multiple partitions and keep the PS3 OS (and thusly play PS3 games) as well as a separate Linux partition.

        However there's one little problem in the PS3 partitioning scheme. You can either devote 10GB to Linux and the rest to GameOS, or 10GB to GameOS and the rest to Linux. Neither is optimal, because 10GB is not really enough for Linux, or GameOS.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by adolf ( 21054 )

          Dumb question, but:

          Couldn't one (on a stock 40GB PS3) dedicate 30GB to GameOS, 10GB to Linux, and plug in an external USB drive to pick up the slack?

          Seems reasonable to me. It's not as if Linux software is particularly huge; 10 gigs should be plenty for Linux program data. Local content can be stored on the external device, and with an appropriate filesystem, shared between Linux and GameOS.

          • Yes, you can, but the problem is you have to set it up to boot with USB storage in the kernel instead of a module. It's also much slower, supposedly the hypervisor makes USB storage access slower than it should be. There's another problem, GameOS can only read FAT drives, not ext3.

            I've complained to Sony about the partitioning scheme, I want to be able to choose a 50%/50% split, or better yet any division of it I want.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by fishfinger ( 685260 )
      Unfortunately, the hypervisor that linux is installed on top of, does not expose the accelerated parts of the PS3 to linux. Therefore XBMC cannot take advantage of them either.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by BLKMGK ( 34057 )

      Sorry, no go. There's not good enough video support in the PS3 jail. There is a HUGE thread in the XBMC forum about this and the answer is no right now it's not running. They would be interested in someone doing a PPC port though.

  • Anyone have any hands on experience with both or have a link to any information discussing the pros/cons of these two media centers?

    I am about to invest a couple thousand into 3 MacMinis and 2 AppleTV units, which hooked up to a 3TB NAS device (drobo) can all share via Airport Extreme from my shared iTunes folder (which is already set up as a media share on the drobo). By attaching a secondary Airport Extreme in b/g compat mode, I hope to use my iPhone as a remote control -- mainly for the NiceCast iTunes r

    • On XP at least, support of remote controls is poor. I guess Microsoft want to sell you to a copy of Media Center Edition or the equivelent Vista version, so they withhold the drivers.

      I assume it's better on Linux.

    • It can stream just about any type of media you can think of. It can't, however, deal with drm. So if you've bought anything from the iTUnes store you best stick with the Apple stuff. It can use the xbox remote but honestly I found using the controller to be easier to use with XBMC. There are scripts which allow it to use youtube and such but there's no web browser so you can't go to hulu.com with it as far as I know.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mjwx ( 966435 )

      So can this media center do all this:
      - Allow multiple units to access one iTunes and iPhoto NAS share
      - Stream media (mp3s ... or even better mp4/h.264 Video)
      - Receive streaming media broadcasts
      - Allow 100% control by a remote (no keyboard/mouse req'd)
      - Natively support either a network remote or IR remote hardware

      I'm about to sink A$700 into a low end PC to do all that. Granted it I'll only have a DVD drive not a blu-ray drive (maybe when they come down in price). Except for the Itunes bit, I absolut

  • (as above)

  • I'll have to check this out. A similar program that hasn't gotten much attention is Elisa [fluendo.com]. There are packages for Windows and many linux distributions [fluendo.com].

    • I ran XBMC on my gen 1 xbox many years ago. Recently I got a nice HTPC w/ elisa running - and elisa was nice. A few months ago I switched back to XBMC on my htpc, and it's well ahead of elisa. So many awesome things I don't have time to write here, but I'll name a few:

      #1. 2 click IMDB scanning and automated from thereon
      #2. When you "stop" something from playing, and come back to it later and press play it asks you if you want to start from the beginning or resume (This is a "little thing" but really shows h

  • I have an xbox and use xbmc on it. it's quite good. this software is just something we all have wanted for so long. It plays anything in any format. It streams music and movies and rss feeds.

    it's all function and feature sans vapor.

  • If you have a not yet softmodded Xbox, and an original copy of Splinter Cell, The Gentlemen's Complete And Unabridged Guide For The Softmodding Of The Microsoft Xbox [mrdictionary.net] will help you download all the necessary files to softmod the Xbox, copy them over, install the softmod and install XBMC for Xbox.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

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