I decided to look at XBMC again but in much more detail this time with a possible view of actually migrating away from Windows Media Center to XBMC. Why you may ask? Well I still love WMC and its served my needs very well over the years, I still have a live system running on all the TV’’s in my home, the back-end is a home made WHS server with My Movies. I think everyone is aware now that WMC is a legacy product, yes it will still be available in the Pro version of Windows 8 with a paid download and yes that means it is still going to be around for many years yet and “supported” I say the term supported very loosely indeed. But it means that nothing is really going to be changing with WMC as far as new features and development goes, well at least not from Microsoft but third party developers I’m sure will continue. I don’t think XBMC will come close to WMC in the PVR department, this Wiki page suggests you can use XBMC as a PVR but its under heavy development. Anyone using it?
So anyhow I downloaded the latest version of XBMC Eden 11 for Windows and installed it on my laptop. If I do decided to switch to XBMC I will probably go the whole hog and use some distribution of Linux as well! But for now Windows it is. I initially plan to keep the back-end running My Movies for WHS too much work to ditch everything and start totally from scratch although that may happen if I go live with XBMC. My Movies has some integration / support for XBMC. In the Collection Management and in the WHS console you can enable metadata for XBMC which will create NFO / TBN files for all your Movie titles. They don’t support XBMC metadata for TV Series at the moment which is a bit of a problem to say the least.
I was recommended Ember Media Manager by a friend and I am currently using that to scrape for data and create the NFO / TBN files for my TV Series on video files. I can seem to get TV Series that are on DVD rips to even be displayed properly or play in XBMC at the moment, I have a feeling it just doesn’t work? Or maybe I’m not doing it quite right?
The first thing that hits you with XBMC is just the potential of what could be possible with it and the sheer size and scope of development, there are so many skins and program addons and addons of all types. I have already installed addons for BBC iPlayer, ITV Player, 40D, Demand5 and TVCatchup, had a quick go with them and they seem to work pretty well, none as pretty as TunerFree MCE but you don’t have to contend with embedded webpages, all the videos play natively in the XBMC player. The other thing that hits you is the number of settings, they seems to be way to many for my liking especially when compared to WMC. But I guess settings means you can do a lot more if you know what those settings do?
Below are some screen shots of my standalone XBMC install on the laptop, although it is linked to all the media files on the WHS so has full libraries built up. I am currently using the Aeon MQ3 skin which appears to be the best looking and my friend who is an XBMC guru and has been helping me a bit, says its just the best skin to have!
If I get in to XBMC more I may post up some demo videos of my setup when I am happy with it.
Main start menu – not sure what they call it.
Movies
TV Shows
Whilst on the start menu you can push up and go to Recent. I am assuming its listing recently added TV shows although it might be recently watched?
You can do the same on the Movies menu as well as on the Music and Concerts menus.
Music menu item
Videos menu item
Concerts menu item – This only appeared after I had installed the Aeon MQ3 skin.
Images menu item – You can move the position of the main menu by pressing up or down, this is in the down position. I don’t like the images area its only folder / file browsing mode there is no pictures library like WMC / WMP.
Shutdown
Settings
And finally weather
I haven’t actually tried using a remote control as yet so can’t comment on that.
Movies – Views
Wall
3D Wall
Showcase
There was an artwork addon that had to be added for the Aeon MQ3 skin, this artwork addon scrapes for additional images like the four thumbs you can see below. It has saved these additional images in each movies folder on my WHS. I had a bit of a panic when I saw it doing this but it appears not to have over written any existing images that My Movies had put there.
Cover Flow had to be there didn’t it!
Shelf
Large List
Low List
Panel
List
Multiplex
As you can see with this Aeon MQ3 skin there are a lot of views in the movie library. It is recommended you turn off the views you know you wont be using, makes it faster apparently.
You can right click any movie title and select Movie Information from the popup menu to see a screen like this
I have to say the native codec support is well, amazing. It plays Blu-rays out of the box (Main movie only). The XBMC player played virtually every file format and container I threw at it, from my collection of test sample video files. There were two things it did not play for me, one being WTV files (DVR-MS OK) and the second being some .MOV files I had which originally came from the iTunes store. It did play other .MOV files I had fine however. I have not connected to an AVR yet and tried to bit stream, does that work? Looks like XBMC has a new Audio system coming in version 12 called Audio Engine.
Well that’s it for part one more in part two. Let me know if you are a Windows Media Center user? and how you feel about its future and your plans if any, to stay or move away?
I use xbmc, but only to supplement WMC. The only thing I use it for is the streaming plugins which are good, problem is wmc does TV so well it’s hard to fully migrate.
Live TV is always going to be hard to beat WMC is the best. I just downloaded a new TV Show copied the files in to my watched TV folder on the WHS, My Movies automatically added it in to the collection and I can now see it in WMC I didn’t have to do a thing other than move the files in to their final resting place in the TV folder.
Opened XBMC and its not there, selected to update library and it then says cannot connect to remote server, what remote server? TheTVDB ? I have to have XBMC automated so any new files I copy in to my folders just automatically appear in XMBC. I am sure its possible to set that up but I don’t know how yet.
I wonder how reliable these free metadata scrapers are in XBMC? Least with My Movies data you always know its up and running. It always seems really slow in XBMC updating the TV Shows library and I haven’t got that many things in there.
i find it weird you can’t use local metadata in xbmc, or not easily as far as i can see. i use media center master and i converted all my mediabrowser metadata to xbmc but it just ignored it and downloaded anyway.
on live tv, i have seen on another post here mentioned about a dvblink client for xbmc and i guess this is how its most likely to arrive.
plus dvblink have moved the whole PVR functionality to be external to WMC now so there is no dependency. i’m interested to see what they do in Windows 8, i think they could quite easily create a whole replacement for the live tv element of WMC, which in addition to a tile for mediabrowser would about put me where i currently am with WMC.
i too am looking at XBMC for the raspberry pi at the mo so interested to see what it can do but i think it’ll be a long time before i move away from a windows OS, linux is still gibberish to me! raspberry pi/xbmc for extenders, WMC for main box i hope
The update library command I manually started in XBMC has finished now and the new TV Show is listed in XBMC and looks OK with data scraped from TheTVDB.com which their website was down earlier today btw. Need to looking in to having that more automated for sure.
Much like yourself I’ve been looking into alternatives to WMC. I currently run WMC + WHS 2011 + Xbox 360 as Media Centre Extender. With the various announcements from MS about Win 8 I too wonder of the future of WMC. I’m quite surprised that there isn’t just moved recorded TV and TV guide into a metro app as the metro UI looks and works great as a10 foot interface. I’m not a coder but wonder how hard it would be to create metro UI for the TV guide ???
I too have looked at XBMC but was first triggered by the raspberry-pi (still awaiting to place an order) but have seen one running as colleague at work has got one. Again much like yourself XBMC looks very polished interface and I like the iplayer add-ins and the way they play the content. The biggest issue though is the Live TV setup as the biggest reason for the use of WMC is the single interface for all my content. The wife approval rating is very very high on this setup and loves single remote/screen setup. Also the fact recorded TV is shared across all TV’s unlike Sky+/virgin/BT Vision.
In the research I’ve done I too hit the Live TV/PVR is experimental page but looking on youtube found this which looks of great interest – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gA7YpbyxNM what I’ve read is that xbmc has native support to be a frontend for myth tv on the mythtv wiki. So my thoughts are mythbuntu backend for TV. Then raspberry-pi with XBMC as frontends. Due to lack of hardware and constant use of the WMC going to be quite tricky to test, but I’m going to put 2nd hard drive into my existing WMC and as I find downtime between schedule recorded tv will try out Mythbuntu. I have old laptop that I can put xbmc on as frontend, but think could take a few months of playing around.
Spencer
Creating the TV guide would not be that hard in Metro, but the problem is that you can’t communicate with any other applications on the system. There is no way to call in to the media centre infrastructure to get the TV guide data. You can’t even do it by running remote potato on the system, because you can’t even talk to services on localhost. So in order for it to work Microsoft are going to need to loosen up the application store requirements.
It’ll be great on a tablet, because you will be able to access remote potato as HD EPG does on the phone, that’ll be fantastic, but to do it on the local machine currently isn’t possible. You may be able to do it if you have developer licence, but that makes it impractical for wider distribution.
I’d be interested to know about the PVR capabilities – that’s what I use media centre for. Ideally I would want a Windows 8 Metro version of media centre, it would fit in there really well, but it doesn’t seem Microsoft care about this 🙁 To be honest building video playback capabilities is not that hard in a Metro application, it’s the back-end recording capabilities which you currently can’t do because of the limitations that applications within Metro can’t do communication to other components on the system.
All the issues I’ve seen mentioned in this article and in the comments have solutions and some of them quite simple.
I’ve been using XBMC since the days when it was called XBMP on the Xbox1. I have it running on PC’s, iphones, ipads and ATV2. I’ve never run into an issue that cant be fixed one way or another by asking the XBMC community in the XBMC forums. There are lots of very helpfull people out there.
Also the AEON MQ3 skin is certainly nice BUT it does use more resources to run than some of the others. On ION based hardware the gui may not be as fast with AEON as it would be with a skin like NEON (my current choice after moving to it from Aeon). This can be fixed up to a point by setting up xbmc to use “Dirty Regions” via the advancedsettings.xml file. More info on this can be found on the XBMC wiki page.
The advancedsettings.xml file is also where you can add regular expressions to get library scanning working if your using a non standard naming convention. I for example have my TV show files named by episode number and then episode title. These then live in folders for the show name and season. XBMC by default doesnt like this convention and so I have to add a regular expression so that it reads the files without me having to rename everything.
There’s alot more to the advancedsettings.xml file. Check the wiki for more info.
I made the switch to XBMC a while back. I now do most TV recording on my Humax Freesat box so the lack of a PVR is no problem.
I’ve encountered and managed to solve a few problems:
1. To get BluRays to play in Arcsoft TMT, create an entry in playercorefactory.xml pointing to uDTStart.exe then, to play a movie, navigate to the BDMV folder, right click index.bdmv and click the Arcsoft play option you created. A bit of a faff but it works well. Not so much a limitation of XBMC but of TMT.
2. I was getting subtitles every time I tried to watch bluRays with the native player. The trick was to select the audio icon from the XBMC player menu and change the track from there.
I think the Media Centre remote just worked. If not it was very easy to set up. There is no easy option for substituting the left and right click, though. So I assigned number keys to ‘Info’ and ‘ContextMenu’ (and ‘ToggleFullScreen’ while I was at it) in the global section of keyboard.xml.
The only problem I’ve not yet overcome is a noticeable stutter about 30 seconds into playing WAV files. The next release will add a new option to use the Windows codec instead of the XBMC one, which should solve that problem.
You might want to try the XBMC visualisations and the song lyrics addins.
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You can do the same on the Movies menu as well as on the Music and Concerts menus.
some look at the plugins would be nice.
I use xbmc, but only to supplement WMC. The only thing I use it for is the streaming plugins which are good, problem is wmc does TV so well it’s hard to fully migrate.
Live TV is always going to be hard to beat WMC is the best. I just downloaded a new TV Show copied the files in to my watched TV folder on the WHS, My Movies automatically added it in to the collection and I can now see it in WMC I didn’t have to do a thing other than move the files in to their final resting place in the TV folder.
Opened XBMC and its not there, selected to update library and it then says cannot connect to remote server, what remote server? TheTVDB ? I have to have XBMC automated so any new files I copy in to my folders just automatically appear in XMBC. I am sure its possible to set that up but I don’t know how yet.
I wonder how reliable these free metadata scrapers are in XBMC? Least with My Movies data you always know its up and running. It always seems really slow in XBMC updating the TV Shows library and I haven’t got that many things in there.
i find it weird you can’t use local metadata in xbmc, or not easily as far as i can see. i use media center master and i converted all my mediabrowser metadata to xbmc but it just ignored it and downloaded anyway.
on live tv, i have seen on another post here mentioned about a dvblink client for xbmc and i guess this is how its most likely to arrive.
plus dvblink have moved the whole PVR functionality to be external to WMC now so there is no dependency. i’m interested to see what they do in Windows 8, i think they could quite easily create a whole replacement for the live tv element of WMC, which in addition to a tile for mediabrowser would about put me where i currently am with WMC.
i too am looking at XBMC for the raspberry pi at the mo so interested to see what it can do but i think it’ll be a long time before i move away from a windows OS, linux is still gibberish to me! raspberry pi/xbmc for extenders, WMC for main box i hope
The update library command I manually started in XBMC has finished now and the new TV Show is listed in XBMC and looks OK with data scraped from TheTVDB.com which their website was down earlier today btw. Need to looking in to having that more automated for sure.
Hi Stuart
Much like yourself I’ve been looking into alternatives to WMC. I currently run WMC + WHS 2011 + Xbox 360 as Media Centre Extender. With the various announcements from MS about Win 8 I too wonder of the future of WMC. I’m quite surprised that there isn’t just moved recorded TV and TV guide into a metro app as the metro UI looks and works great as a10 foot interface. I’m not a coder but wonder how hard it would be to create metro UI for the TV guide ???
I too have looked at XBMC but was first triggered by the raspberry-pi (still awaiting to place an order) but have seen one running as colleague at work has got one. Again much like yourself XBMC looks very polished interface and I like the iplayer add-ins and the way they play the content. The biggest issue though is the Live TV setup as the biggest reason for the use of WMC is the single interface for all my content. The wife approval rating is very very high on this setup and loves single remote/screen setup. Also the fact recorded TV is shared across all TV’s unlike Sky+/virgin/BT Vision.
In the research I’ve done I too hit the Live TV/PVR is experimental page but looking on youtube found this which looks of great interest – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gA7YpbyxNM what I’ve read is that xbmc has native support to be a frontend for myth tv on the mythtv wiki. So my thoughts are mythbuntu backend for TV. Then raspberry-pi with XBMC as frontends. Due to lack of hardware and constant use of the WMC going to be quite tricky to test, but I’m going to put 2nd hard drive into my existing WMC and as I find downtime between schedule recorded tv will try out Mythbuntu. I have old laptop that I can put xbmc on as frontend, but think could take a few months of playing around.
Spencer
@Spencer,
Creating the TV guide would not be that hard in Metro, but the problem is that you can’t communicate with any other applications on the system. There is no way to call in to the media centre infrastructure to get the TV guide data. You can’t even do it by running remote potato on the system, because you can’t even talk to services on localhost. So in order for it to work Microsoft are going to need to loosen up the application store requirements.
It’ll be great on a tablet, because you will be able to access remote potato as HD EPG does on the phone, that’ll be fantastic, but to do it on the local machine currently isn’t possible. You may be able to do it if you have developer licence, but that makes it impractical for wider distribution.
…Stefan
I’d be interested to know about the PVR capabilities – that’s what I use media centre for. Ideally I would want a Windows 8 Metro version of media centre, it would fit in there really well, but it doesn’t seem Microsoft care about this 🙁 To be honest building video playback capabilities is not that hard in a Metro application, it’s the back-end recording capabilities which you currently can’t do because of the limitations that applications within Metro can’t do communication to other components on the system.
…Stefan
stefan, perhaps look at dvblink? PVR capabilities and an epg
All the issues I’ve seen mentioned in this article and in the comments have solutions and some of them quite simple.
I’ve been using XBMC since the days when it was called XBMP on the Xbox1. I have it running on PC’s, iphones, ipads and ATV2. I’ve never run into an issue that cant be fixed one way or another by asking the XBMC community in the XBMC forums. There are lots of very helpfull people out there.
Also the AEON MQ3 skin is certainly nice BUT it does use more resources to run than some of the others. On ION based hardware the gui may not be as fast with AEON as it would be with a skin like NEON (my current choice after moving to it from Aeon). This can be fixed up to a point by setting up xbmc to use “Dirty Regions” via the advancedsettings.xml file. More info on this can be found on the XBMC wiki page.
The advancedsettings.xml file is also where you can add regular expressions to get library scanning working if your using a non standard naming convention. I for example have my TV show files named by episode number and then episode title. These then live in folders for the show name and season. XBMC by default doesnt like this convention and so I have to add a regular expression so that it reads the files without me having to rename everything.
There’s alot more to the advancedsettings.xml file. Check the wiki for more info.
I made the switch to XBMC a while back. I now do most TV recording on my Humax Freesat box so the lack of a PVR is no problem.
I’ve encountered and managed to solve a few problems:
1. To get BluRays to play in Arcsoft TMT, create an entry in playercorefactory.xml pointing to uDTStart.exe then, to play a movie, navigate to the BDMV folder, right click index.bdmv and click the Arcsoft play option you created. A bit of a faff but it works well. Not so much a limitation of XBMC but of TMT.
2. I was getting subtitles every time I tried to watch bluRays with the native player. The trick was to select the audio icon from the XBMC player menu and change the track from there.
I think the Media Centre remote just worked. If not it was very easy to set up. There is no easy option for substituting the left and right click, though. So I assigned number keys to ‘Info’ and ‘ContextMenu’ (and ‘ToggleFullScreen’ while I was at it) in the global section of keyboard.xml.
The only problem I’ve not yet overcome is a noticeable stutter about 30 seconds into playing WAV files. The next release will add a new option to use the Windows codec instead of the XBMC one, which should solve that problem.
You might want to try the XBMC visualisations and the song lyrics addins.
Have fun – I wouldn’t move back now.
Andy
sorry, but that wont work for me. single system, whole of house. until xbmc can play live tv then it’s not doing it for me.