XBMCbuntu let me count the ways...

Since Microsoft decided no-one uses Media Centre and removed it from the standard Windows 8 build (it will be available as an add-on) I thought it would be fitting to talk about the potential alternatives for media player computers.

Now, I was going to go through and install a whole mess of different media players and review them here but basically I put XBMCbuntu on a old Asus laptop and it was so good I never even needed to look at the rest. I love this box.. allow me to elaborate;

First off here's my list of requirements on a media centre and gives a clue as to why I don't just go and buy the excellent Western Digital network media player or the like.

REQUIREMENTS:

1. Plays everything with minimal codec installation/downloading required,
2. My wife can use it without hurting me (Intuitive UI)
3. Stable, never crashes.
4. Sleep/Wake via my MCE remote so I don't have to get up to turn it on (particularly annoying when you run a laptop as your media box because you need to open the lid),
5. Runs a SNES emulator for super mariolicious fun from within the interface,
6. Play/Records the TV stream from my HDHomeRun,
7. Gets all my album info from the interwebs,
8. Doesn't require a beastly machine to run it,
9. Has iTunes DJ type functionality (Party Mode).
10. I don't need my mouse and keyboard plugged into it constantly.
11. Remote control from my phone.

OPTIONAL

1. Torrentz
2. Rent movies legitimately (like on iTunes) 
3. Receives Airplay from my iPhone
4. Sound over HDMI (not really required because I plug the audio into an amp anyway)

The reason its such a weird list is because this reflects exactly how we used our existing media box which was Win 7 based, we used iTunes for music and renting movies, uTorrent for Torrents, Media Center for TV recording (which we never used because we had a Pay TV recorder) wzSNES for snes emulation. 

The biggest problem was that I couldn't run it from just a remote so I constantly have a keyboard and mouse plugged into the thing which sat on my coffee table and got in the way, the plus side to that is we could surf the web if one of the 800 other machines were in use.

When faced with the prospect of building a completely new IT solution from scratch my mantra is "always, always, always check out where the Linux based open source options are up to." I suggest this is a very prudent thing to do for any solution especially if you don't want to spend big dollars on IT or if you think your requirements are pretty standard. Even if you know only a little about computers Linux distros like Ubuntu are so easy to use you'd be surprised what you can achieve at the attractive cost of zero dollars... and the pre-built appliances on turnkeylinux.org are AMAZING http://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/turnkey-12... you could literally run an enterprise IT department on those things. Another plus is that you can Google the answer to ANY issue because all the experts are online, unlike a proprietary solution.

So I picked up a copy of XBMCbuntu (its really important not to forget to type the "b" in "buntu") which is XBMC (short for XBox Media Centre) on Ubuntu from here: http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=XBMCbuntu. It's origins are that some clever nerds decided that we really needed a port of the X-Box Media Centre experience to Windows and Linux but it has morphed slightly into just an awesome open media solution.

So here's the first reason I love this thing... I installed it and it just worked.

Not just worked a little bit but did pretty much everything on that list above without any adjustment Googling or messing around, I'm not going to give you a full tutorial on how I set up my XBMCbuntu, there plenty of that on the website but to make it basically PERFECT here's what I needed to do:

1. Install it.
2. Set my music library to to my external HDD and scan the music files into the library, then go into "Library mode."
3. Install the "Rom Browser" add-on so I could launch zSnes emulation (which is just epic AND downloaded the covers and boxes for my game roms)
4. Fixed wake on remote issue by specifying my remote hardware ID using this wiki post: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=134252&pid=1135997#pid1135997
5. Install Web Admin tool which allows me to control it via my phone.
6. Setup the HDHomeRun as a video source.

And that was it... God it's such a good media player, the media format support is off the chart. Plus I can run classic super NES games nights with my mates and it cost me nothing and I never need to plug in the keyboard.

Note I didn't even try to set up torrents (which I know for sure can be done easily) or find a video rental service (which I don't know about but hey... torrents right?)

Now I don't care if Windows don't want to give me media centre, Linux FTW again!